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Sh^FI this GovernmeiaF or Die? 


BY EDWIN G. PINKHAM 

EDITORIAL 5TAFF OF T/iB KAN5AS CITY 3TATL 
REPRINTED BV THE KANiTA^ CITY ^TAR 

1923 

PRICE, 25 CENT5 







































Shall ibiJ' Govcrnimcinii: JLive or Die? 


BY EDWIN G. PINKHAM 


V 


EDITORIAL 5TArF OF T/iL KAN5AS CITY 3TAIL 
REPRINTED BY T/iE KAN^’A6 CITY ^TAR. 

1923 

PPICE 25 CENTC 







































WASHINGTON IN THE UNIFORM OF A VIRGINIA COLONEL. FROM THE PEALE 
PORTRAIT, PAINTED IN 1772, THREE YEARS BEFORE WASHINGTON TOOK 
COMMAND OF THE CONTINENTAL ARMY. 








WHAT OF AMERICA? 

Shall This Government 
Live or Die? 


EDWIN G. PINKHAM 

Editorial Staff 
The Kansas City Star 


■ ■ ■■ 

• ■ ■■ 

■ ■ 

■ ■ 


REPRINTED FROM THE STAR 


1923 











F or I think it an undeniable position that a competent 
knowledge of the laws of that society in which we live is 
the proper accomplishment of every gentleman and 
scholar, a highly useful, I had almost said essential, part of 
liberal and polite education. — Sir William Blackstone. 



©ClA71135e 

/ 

\y' 


Copyright 1923 
THE KANSAS CITY STAR 







What of America? 





Shall This Government Give or Die ? 


An unlearned king is a crowned ass.—Henry 1. 

I. 

When Government Was An Ordinance Of Kings. 

DWARD I of England had a pretty clear head for a 
thirteenth century king. His mother told him that 
a blind man had received his sight by making a 
pilgrimage to the tomb of Henry HI, Edward’s 
father. 

“If I knew my father,” said Edward, “he 
would have been more likely to put the pilgrim’s 
eyes out than restore sight to them.” 

Four centuries were to go by before England was to have 
another king with a head as free from false notions about the 
kingly power. William III was induced, against his will, to lay 
his hand on a sick man who believed his malady would vanish 
at the royal touch. 

“God give you better health,” said William, as he touched 
the sufferer, “and more sense.” 

These kings were exceptions. Most of the others believed, 
or pretended to believe, they were the personal representatives 
of heaven on earth. 

“Kings,” said James I, “are not only God’s lieutenants upon 
earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they 
are called gods.” 

This same monarch expressed the interesting view that he 
was England’s husband, and that as his lawful wife the realm 
was bound to live in due submission to him. 

“I am the head,” explained this Scotch pedant, who had the 
rickets, whose tongue was too large for his mouth and who 
screamed at the sight of a sword, “and England is my body.” 

Shakespeare makes Richard H say: 

Not all the water in the rough rude sea * 

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king. 

Thus there was a time when it was pretended, and be- 

























8 


What of America? 


lieved by many, that among other blessings that of govern¬ 
ment proceeded from the king. He gave its benefits of his 
grace, and could at his pleasure withhold them. The nation 
did not exist. The very soil belonged to the king as lord 
paramount of all. His subjects must consult him before 
they could dispose of what was their own. Even the hand 
of an heiress was the king’s to bestow, and Richard I raised 
money for his crusades virtually by selling rich, subjects in 
marriage. He sold titles and offices, and in course of time 
his successors came to sell legislation, pretty much as political 
brokers whom we hail bosses sell it today. 

How did it come that out of such a situation developed 
government such as we know today? How did our ancestors 
break away from the divine right of kings? At what price 
did they gain for us the freedom we have in this, our America? 

These are questions we shall consider in a series of in¬ 
formal articles on this government of ours. Perhaps then we 
shall be in a position to understand better what a precious 
thing this freedom is. 

If a man from Mars had visited our ancestors a few hun¬ 
dred years ago he might have thought the situation hopeless. 

William Rufus, urged to do something desired by his 
court, could reply that he would not do it, because he knew 
of no reason why he should. 

Henry H’s advisers told him that the will of the king was 
law, that he was above human justice. This king, if crossed 
in his purpose, exhibited the rage of a savage, and would roll 
upon the floor and tear at the rushes with his teeth- 

We can understand how these high pretentions awed and 
crushed opposition.- It is no wonder that a subject, venturing 
into the presence of one of these Angevin kings with a remon¬ 
strance, should have fallen dead of fright at his feet. 

The personal government of the Norman kings and their 
successors gave little indication of legal principles underneath 
the surface. Yet such principles there were. The kingly of¬ 
fice was elective, as it had been under the Saxons, but this did 
not prevent the king naming his successor, nor the succession 
being set aside by the baronage, nor the crown being snatched 
by a rival, nor a king being deposed. All these things hap¬ 
pened. The barons set Matilda aside for Stephen. John 
seized the crown. Edward II was deposed. Richard II was 
deposed. Henry VI was deposed. Edward V was proclaimed 
and then set aside. Legal maxims took early form if they re¬ 
mained ineffective. Henry VFs chief justice pointed out that 
the king’s office had a dual nature, one regal and the other 
political. In his regal capacity, if that were his only one, the 
king might alter the law of the land; but, having a political 
responsibility as well, he was debarred from doing it. This is 
the basis of the modern British constitutional maxim that the 


Shall This Goveenment Live or Die! 9 

king reigns^ hut does not rule. It dates from the fifteenth cen¬ 
tury. The force of the maxim was resisted by kings for hun¬ 
dreds of years, but it stuck. 

Kings ruled, whether by force, by craft, or by bargain. 
Charles II made himself absolute by mere blandness. Under 
constitutional forms he ruled like a Turk. 

The relations he established with his subjects, by which 
he was enabled to be one of the worst kings England ever had, 
may be illustrated by an example of court repartee. 

Ashley (earl of Shaftesbury) was a member of the cabal, 
one of the most corrupt instruments of government ever em¬ 
ployed by a king. 

“Shaftesbury,” said Charles, in admiration of his minister, 
“I believe you are the greatest scoundrel in my dominions.” 

“For a subject, your majesty,” replied Shaftesbury with 
equal truth and impudence, “I believe I am.” 

It was out of such an unpromising state of affairs that our 
ancestors worked and fought their way, with ceaseless ex¬ 
penditure of toil and blood, to the institutions of government 
that we have today. 

It has been said that it is in the nature of Englishmen to 
assemble. Thomas Hutchinson, recording the meeting of Vir¬ 
ginia's first assembly, wrote, “This year a house of burgesses 
broke out in Virginia.” It was spontaneous. This habit of 
Englishmen is what gave birth to the English constitution, “the 
most subtle organism,” as Gladstone said, “that has proceeded 
from progressive history.” Before they began assembling in 
parliament—and frequently afterwards—they assembled with 
arms in their hands, because it was long before their kings 
learned to respect any other kind of opposition. When Henry 
VIII laid an illegal tax, his subjects met the collectors in battle 
array. Henry backed down at once. The “strong government 
of the Tudors,” represented sometimes as absolute, was strong 
in common sense, too. 

The English constitution, said Sir James Mackintosh, his¬ 
torian of James IFs reign, was not made; it grew. It grew by 
the processes here indicated. The king asserted a prerogative 
and backed it up with judicial decisions, easy to obtain. If 
unresisted it stuck and became a precedent, and if not unduly 
oppressive it was likely to stick. Thus Henry II introduced 
the institution of scutage, or shield money, by which a tax 
might be paid to the king in lieu of military service. As this 
offered a way out of going to the Crusades it was rather a 
popular institution than otherwise. But what the subjects of 
Henry did not see was that the king had obtained a power of 
taxation. More than four hundred years later the subjects of 
Charles I were to see it, when that monarch made use of that 
precedent to levy ship money. 

This time the English people—whose habit of assembly 


10 


What of A m e r i c a f 


had meanwhile grown—resisted; at first in the courts where 
they lost, and then in the field where they won. The English 
constitution had grown again. 

Edward IV had learned from his legal advisers that the 
sovereign could not arrest a subject by personal mandate. But 
in that age it was only a legal maxim. The Plantagenets did 
arrest without authority of law and so did the Tudors who 
came after them. But when Charles I attempted to arrest 
five members of the house of commons he found that the an¬ 
cient maxim had become a force. Charles entered the house 
in person where he had no right to be. The house rose and 
uncovered. But when Charles demanded where the members 
were the speaker fell on his knee and declared he had neither 
eyes to see nor ears to hear except as the house directed. The 
English constitution had grown again. 

What we have to remember is, that it was this long and 
slow growth of the English constitution that supplied the po¬ 
litical education of the Englishmen who founded the American 
republic. The English constitution is the parent of the Ameri¬ 
can. English law is the basis of our law. When Washington 
was President of the United States and the government sought 
to enforce his neutrality proclamation, American lawyers 
found there was no statute under which prosecutions would 
stand up. As Mr. Beveridge has pointed out in his admirable 
“Life of John Marshall,” the prosecutions were brought under 
the English common law. 

These are facts to be kept in mind as we go on. 






















































































































































































































































Shall This Government Live or Die! 


11 


As applicable to all of you, 1 will say that it is highly 
expedient to go into history; to inquire into what has 
passed before you on this earth, and in the family of 
man. —Thomas Carlyle. 


Ik 


II. 


The Roots of Our Institutions 


HERE is a really fine saying of Danton, the French 
revolutionist, who, when urged by his friends to 
save himself by flight, asked with contempt, 
“Does a man, then, carry his country on the sole 
of his foot?'’ ' 

We read in history of exiles, banished from 
their country, braving every danger and death 
itself to steal back just to breathe its air, to glimpse again its 
familiar and loved scenes, and to carry away with them to 
foreign lands some twig or plant or handful of grass, gathered 
from .a native hillside. 

It is this love of country we call patriotism, the finest and 
deepest sentiment of which the human heart is capable, for it 
often has been found and accepted as a maxim that a man who 
does not have this love of country in his heart can love neither 
father nor mother nor wife nor child. 

Poets and philosophers tell us such a man can be trusted 
in no human relation. Always, from the earliest times of 
which we have record, the highest crime known to the law of 
any country has been the crime of treason. For that crime the 
most terrible punishments were reserved, and the most lasting 
ignominy attached to the name of the man who committed it. 
Even his blood was tainted as the ancient law declared; and 
his children and his children’s children, generation after gener¬ 
ation, were regarded by their fellows as accursed. 

This country of ours, this America, ought to be regarded 
as our dearest possession on earth; but if we are to have that 
love for it which is its sole protection and defense, we must 
never neglect the study of its history and institutions or allow 
ourselves to forget by what devotion and sacrifices it was made 
for us who now enjoy its blessings. 















12 


What of A'M erica? 


Let us look at it on the map. It is a vast continent washed 
by two mighty oceans. To no people anywhere has been given 
a greater or richer domain. It embraces fertile valleys, broad 
plains, great rivers and lakes and majestic mountains. It 
yields to us in bountiful measure everything that goes to make 
race great and rich and strong. It is ours. We hold it in 
fief to no king or lord, pay no tribute and render no service to 
strangers for its use. 

How did Americans come to possess and enjoy on such 
terms so great a heritage? 

How did it happen the European system was not extended 
over it? 

Whence came those institutions and laws, and finally that 
government, under which America found freedom and happi¬ 
ness and the energy to develop a continent at a time when the 
Old World was prostrate under the oppression of kings? 

The story of how these things came about should be 
known to every American; it is a story that ought never to be 
allowed to grow old or dim; every generation should hear it 
again, and again retell it to its successor; for only with knowl¬ 
edge can we understand its marvel and with wisdom alone can 
it profit us. 

We must go far back of our own history as a nation to 
find the roots of those institutions which, transplanted in the 
soil of the American colonies, produced the government that 
we know. It is important that we trace those roots, for unless 
we understand the nature of that government we cannot know 
the secret of its operation. Ours is what we call free or repre¬ 
sentative government, and its working must always depend, not 
upon the fitness or intelligence of the few, as in countries that 
have the monarchical form, but upon the intelligence and inter¬ 
est of all the people. Government in our country is not handed 
down to the people. The people hand it up to those delegated 
by them to exercise its powers. Of all forms of government, 
then, free government requires the most of those to be gov¬ 
erned—the most in patriotism, the most in political education, 
the most in wisdom. 

Government, we may be sure, never will rise higher in 
these essentials than the source from which it comes. 

If we follow back the roots of our institutions we shall 
find their first growth was in the soil of England. But their 
growth there was not free. Through long centuries there had 
been waged in that country a contest between kings and their 
subjects that had left unsettled the rights of both. But in the 
course of that contest a few constitutional landmarks had been 
set up, not securely and often not easy to identify; but their 
general effect had been to limit more and more the power of 
the king. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 13 

The time came at last when the king was obliged to con¬ 
sult his subjects about the making of laws, and he consulted 
them—very reluctantly and with fierce anger in his heart—in 
what came to be known in time as his great council. We must 
not think of this council just yet as a parliament, though it 
was the beginning of that institution. Only the barons came to 
this council, and they were as haughty and fierce as the king, 
as insistent upon their own rights as he and as contemptuous 
of the rights of the common people, whom they held to be no 
better—and to have no more part in the government of Eng¬ 
land—than the cattle that grazed on their broad lands. 

But in this great council was a principle, not recognized 
yet and scarcely thought of, that was to become great and 
powerful in the history of peoples and government, and we 
shall next find out what this principle was and trace its growth 
a little. 


14 


What of America? 


And first it (law) is a rule; not a transient, sudden 
order from a superior to a particular person; hut some¬ 
thing permanent, uniform and universal. —Blackstone. 

III. 


Origin of the Representative Principle ■ 


HERE never was a time in the history of the Eng¬ 
lish kingship, Saxon or Norman, when it was not 
conceded in law and custom, that the king could 
not tax his subjects or legislate for them without 
their consent. That principle goes back to the 
very earliest times of which we have record. But, 
of course, we must not suppose the principle al¬ 
ways was observed by the king. 

When* in the days before the Conquest, the Saxon kings 
got into trouble and consulted their wise men as to how to get 
out, they could have had little idea that they were putting 
into practice what we know as the representative principle. 
Yet that is what they were doing. They were calling upon 
their subjects—^the most representative of them—for advice. 
These councilors did not think of themselves as being repre¬ 
sentatives of the people, yet that is what they were. And 
presently when they began to charge for their advice—and for 
their consent, for the one soon came to mean the other—and 
to bargain with the king, they did not think of themselves as bar¬ 
gaining for the people, yet that is what they were doing. 

After the Saxons came the Normans, and we think of the 
Normans as being absolute kings; arbitrary in rule, cruel in 
oppression, terrible in punishment. So they were and meant 
to be. But though they hated the Saxons and treated them 
with the utmost rigor—though they tried to stamp them out 
as a people—they insensibly or of necessity incorporated the 
laws of the land into their own system. Thus immediately 
after the Conquest William I summoned to him a number of 
persons from each county to give him an account of his new sub¬ 
jects, and Sir Mathew Hale tells us this assemblage when it 
met the king was **as sufficient and effectual a parliament as 
ever was held in England.” 

We can see what he meant by that, for a parliament 
meant simply a talk between the king and his subjects. No- 














Shalij This Goveenment Live ok Die! 15 

body at first, and least of all the king, regarded these talks 
as of much importance; but we know now that the king of 
England in the course of a few centuries talked himself out of 
most of his powers and that his subjects talked themselves into 
them. 

Thus the representative system began. The king, if he • 
thought of it at all, which probably he didn’t, thought of himself 
as sending representatives down to his subjects. That is, it 
was his custom previous to the thirteenth century to appoint 
his councilors to go down, to the countries and towns and find 
out how much each could pay in taxes. But after awhile this 
system was reversed and the counties and towns sent their 
representatives wp to the king to confer with him on these 
matters. That little reversal of a custom—perhaps made for 
mere convenience—was a tremendous revolution. The repre¬ 
sentatives were no longer representatives of the king, but rep¬ 
resentatives of the people. The king’s representatives had 
gone down to the people and asked, “How much can you pay?” 
The people’s representatives now came up to the king and 
asked, “How much will you give?” In the way of concessions, 
that is. 

We find this representative system creeping in every¬ 
where. Thus, when Henry H ordered a collection—a tax 
really—to finance a crusade, some of his subjects complained 
that their share was too great, or perhaps tried to dodge giv¬ 
ing anything at all. So what was done? Why, in every county 
a board was organized, a board of assessors we would call it, 
to judge these cases and fix the tax. Thus there were little 
neighborhood parliaments all over the country each superin¬ 
tending the local taxation. A representative system complete, 
and in the twelfth century. 

We think of these kings as absolute, yet here was the 
great principle working. Again when Henry HI wanted money 
to annex the crown of Sicily to his own—the pope having given 
it to him on the condition that he go and get it—we see the 
great council refusing to invest in the enterprise. Henry was 
furious but helpless. “No money until you correct our 
grievances,” said the barons. Henry sulked and the crown of 
Sicily went elsewhere. 

If we want to understand the importance of these prece¬ 
dents we have only to note how the principle and even the 
language of the early constitutional guarantees persisted 
through the ages. No matter how often they were violated by 
strong kings, they were revived when a weak one came along 
and kept alive until they finally stuck. John was the weakest 
of the Conqueror’s line, and John it was whom the barons 
nailed and made to put their guarantees in writing, and in the 
Great Charter of 1215 it was written: “No freeman shall be 



16 


What of Ameeica? 


taken or imprisoned, or disseized or outlawed, or exiled, or in 
any way destroyed but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or 
by the law of the land/’ 

Nearly six centuries later this same principle was written 
into the Constitution of the United States in two places. The 
fifth amendment says: ‘‘No person shall be * * * de¬ 

prived of life, liberty or property, without due process of 
law. * * *” And the fourteenth amendment repeats as to 

the states: “Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, 
liberty or property without due process of law.” 

Judgment of his peers and trial by jury are the same 
thing. The law of the land and due process of law are the 
same thing. 

John’s barons thought they were working for theniselves, 
but now we see they were working for a great principle of 
government that was to outlive them and all their kind. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


17 



A time, however, came in the progress of human af¬ 
fairs when men ceased to think it a necessity of Nature 
that their governors should he an independent power, 
opposed in interest to themselves. —John Stuart Mill. 

IV. 

Government by Barter. 

N THOSE days, as ^ve have seen, the chief thing 
kings Avanted was money—and perhaps that’s 
what they still want—because it took money to 
hire soldiers and make wars; and unless the 
king was fighting his neighbors most of the time 
he wasn’t thought to be much of a king. If he 
was too poor to fight his neighbors he would 
sometimes console himself by fighting his subjects, which was 
much cheaper, but not so satisfying a sport. 

The kings of England, while usually wealthy in their own 
right—which wasn’t very remarkable considering that they 
were extremely free in helping themselves to what they 
wanted, and cutting off the owner’s head if he objected—had 
long ago found that if they were to get all the fighting they 
wanted somebody else would have to help pay for it. Their 
subjects would have to pay. 

So long as that first process we spoke of lasted, where 
the king sent his representatives down to the people to do 
the collecting, the money came in pretty freely. This was the 
period of the great council, which we may now begin to think 
of as the house of lords. It lasted from the Conquest—which 
was in 1066—to 1265, when the representative system sud¬ 
denly broadened. A powerful subject of Henry HI rebelled 
against him, defeated the king in battle, and virtually became 
king himself. This was the famous Simon de Montfort, and 
the battle of Lewes, where he took Henry prisoner, was the 
English kingship’s first Bunker Hill. Simon didn’t mean to 
take the crown or keep it, but he did mean to compel the king 
to bargain with him; and to strengthen his hand for these 
negotiations he called the first real parliament that ever as¬ 
sembled in England. It didn’t consist of barons solely who 
represented their subjects, but of these lesser subjects as well 
who represented themselves and the communes in which they 
dwelt. These lesser subjects who came to Simon’s parliament 
were the first house of commons. 

From this time on the kings of England were, in theory 
at least, constitutional monarchs. They might thresh about 

















18 


What of America? 


and tug at their bonds as much as they chose, and most of 
them did choose to; they might even break through them, as 
now and again they did; but struggle as they might and even 
range free temporarily as some of the strong ones did, they 
were confronted at last by a parliament of the nation backed 
by the ancient law that said the king could not raise a farthing 
in taxes without the good will and assent of the estates of the 
realm. 

To get that good will and assent—in other words, to get 
money—now became the principal business of the English 
sovereigns, and to make the. sovereign pay for the revenue he 
wanted, in the shape of constitutional concessions, became the 
principal business of the parliaments. This bartering .had 
begun long ago when the barons were seeking concessions for 
themselves; they it was who had established the principle that 
the subjects (meaning themselves) controlled the nation's 
purse strings. When the great council at last became the 
parliament, and was representative of the nation, instead of 
just the barons, the house of commons inherited from the bar- 
terers these same purse strings. 

Which we may be sure was not what the barons had in¬ 
tended at all. 

This circumstance, and this alone, is what made England 
a limited monarchy at a time- when absolutely monarchy was 
the rule on the continent. 

Charles I tried to break through these constitutional 
bonds. He tried to destroy the representative principle as it 
had existed for four hundred years and to rule without a par¬ 
liament. In other words he tried to establish in England the 
theory of the French kingship. Like his predecessors he bar¬ 
gained with his parliaments; like them he repudiated his bar¬ 
gains after receiving his price. But unlike them, he tried, 
when all bargains failed, to get along without parliament alto¬ 
gether. He laid taxes of his own will. He raised armies with¬ 
out authority. For a period twice as long as any English 
sovereign had ruled without summoning a parliament, he es- 
serted the claim that his subjects had no part in the govern¬ 
ment of England. 

If he had made that claim good the laws and the institu¬ 
tions that had been growing up in England since the Conquest 
would have perished; their transplanting to America would 
have been halted, and the growth of government here would 
have been under circumstances no more favorable than had 
been supplied by the Spanish power itself. The representative 
principle in Spain, as elsewhere on the continent, had been 
stamped out; and although the Spaniards were first across 
the Atlantic they left no imprint of law or government on 
America's soil. 


Shall This Government Live or Die! 


19 


Give parliament command of the militia? By God, 
not for an hour! —Charles 1. 

Don't be afraid, brother; nobody will kill me to make 
you king. —Charles II to the duke of York, afterwards 
James 11. 

V. 


English Roots of Liberty Are Transplanted to American Soil. 

HAT England should have become a limited mon¬ 
archy was of vast importance to those English¬ 
men who founded the colonial power in Amer¬ 
ica; for if the English kings could have taxed 
their subjects as the French kings taxed theirs, 
the Plantagenets and the Tudors would have 
gathered great standing armies around the 
throne and no parliament ever would have set at Westminster. 

None of those other political institutions to which the 
American colonists fell heir would have taken root in England, 
and the political education of Englishmen would have been 
delayed as long as that of Frenchmen. In that case the char¬ 
acter of the American revolution, if it had occurred at all, 
would have been very different from what it was. 

But the representative principle had been established in 
England so early and so firmly that when, in the seventeenth 
century, an English king allowed eleven years to elapse be¬ 
tween parliaments, his subjects declared he had broken the 
fundamental law of the land. Contrast that with the French 
kingship. In the eighteenth century, when the French estates 
assembled to try to cure the ills of that kingship, they had 
not sat for 175 years. In France the king had control of the 
purse. 

But the representative check—which meant that nobody 
could tax the people but themselves—was not the only one 
that the ancestors of the colonists* had asserted and won dur¬ 
ing their long contest with their kings. The English king, 
great as were his power and privileges, could not of his own 
will or act arrest or confine a subject. A Plantagenet king 
thought this a most outrageous state of affairs, but his own 
minister, on bended knee, explained to him the reason. 

'Tf the arrest be illegal,” he pointed out, 'The subject 
has no recourse against the sovereign.” 

While the English king, we may suppose with frowning 
brows, was listening to that explanation, French kings across 
a narrow neck of water were sending French subjects to 
lifelong imprisonment, without trial and without charges, by 
a scratch of the royal pen. 

















20 


What of America? 



No English subject could be arrested without being in¬ 
formed of the charges against him, nor imprisoned without a 
trial, nor convicted except by a jury. 

A Stuart king who tried to override the law learned the 
same lesson the Plantagenet had learned. “I am above the 
law!” he had declared. “Your majesty may be above the 
law,” answered the courageous minister who had resisted him, 
“but I am not.” 

So jealous were English subjects of any such kingly 
pretentions that no English parliament ever would grant the 
king a military law for the discipline of his army. The court- 
martial, therefore, was unknown in England until modern 
times, when all danger that English liberties might be sub¬ 
verted by the king’s arms was at an end. An English soldier 
who struck his officer could be tried only for common assault 
in a civil court. 

• 


THE MAYFLOWER COMPACT REVEALS THE ORDERLY POLITICAL IDEAS THE 
AMERICAN COLONISTS BROUGHT TO THIS COUNTRY. 

It must not be thought that the English kings never over¬ 
stepped or evaded these laws. They did. Sometimes if the 
public danger were great or there was a plot against the king’s 
life or throne, he was allowed to resort to extraordinary meas¬ 
ures. Torture, for example, never was legal in England. But 
it was pretty generally known it was employed in cases af¬ 
fecting the welfare of the crown. Nor was trial by jury al¬ 
ways a guarantee that a prisoner’s legal rights would be re- 
























Shall This Government Live or Die? 21 

spected. Where the king’s pleasure was known, the sheriffs 
generally managed to find a courtly jury. Even in the matter 
of a standing army the king sometimes found ways of defeat¬ 
ing the purpose of his parliaments, and starved the civil estab¬ 
lishment in order to keep larger armed forces than his sub¬ 
jects wanted him to have. 

That English subjects of the seventeenth century should 
have thought themselves oppressed and should have braved 
the terrors of an ocean and a wilderness to escape that oppres¬ 
sion only goes to show how far English ideas of liberty had 
advanced beyond those of the continent. It has sometimes 
pleased one school of historical opinion to make out that from 
the first the American colonists were a rebellious and dis¬ 
loyal lot, but as a matter of fact the Englishmen who stayed 
at home were much more rebellious than those who crossed the 
Atlantic. They beheaded one king and deposed another for 
exactly the same reasons that drove the Pilgrims to Massa¬ 
chusetts. The Mayflower compact reveals the orderly politi¬ 
cal ideas which they brought to these shores. 

“In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names 
are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread 
sovereign lord. King James, by the grace of God, 
of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, king, defend¬ 
er of the faith, etc., having undertaken, for the glory 
of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and 
honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the 
first colony in the Northerne parts of Virginia, doe, 
by these presents solemnly and mutually in the pres¬ 
ence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine 
our-selves together into a civil body politick, for our bet¬ 
ter ordering and preservation and furtherance of the 
ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, con¬ 
stitute, and frame such just and equall laws, ordi¬ 
nances, acts, ^constitutions, and offices, from time to 
time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient 
for the general good of the colonie unto which we 
promise all due submission and obedience. In wit¬ 
ness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our 
names at Cap-Codd the 11 of November, in the year 
of the reigne of ,our sovereign lord. King James, of 
England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of 
Scotland the fiftie-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620.” 

Spanish discoverers, explorers, adventurers and even col¬ 
onists of a sort had been coming to these shores for a century 
and a quarter; but they were Englishmen who promulgated 
the first political and constitutional document America was to 
know. There is no mistaking the language of this document. 
It is constitutional English—and English kings were to hear 
more of it both at home and from America. 


22 


What of America? 


Institutions containing in substance all that ages 
had done for human government were organized in a 
forest. —Daniel Webster. 


VI. 


The Colonists Declare Themselves in on Government. 



They set up on these shores, not one, but a group 
of little Englands, and in every one of them the contest be¬ 
tween people and prerogative, as it had been going on in the 
mother England, was continued. 

But the Englishmen in America were bolder in these 
contests that were Englishmen at home, for the colonists 
were not within immediate reach of the king’s arm. They 
were at a safe distance from the throne and the Tower of 
London, and those who governed them for the crown were 
little more than hostages in the hands of the governed. The 
colonists had a pretty good idea of themselves, too. 

“God sifted a whole nation,” said Governor Stoughton, 
“that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness.” 

The choice grain produced an early harvest of represen¬ 
tative assemblies and self-governing institutions that would 
have astonished the Stuart kings had they witnessed the same 
phenomena at home. While James I was talking his kingly 
nonsense about his divine authority and warning his parlia¬ 
ment not to “meddle with the mysteries of state,” a young 
parliament of Virginians at Jamestown was passing laws with¬ 
out the slightest apparent fear either of the mysteries of state 
or the authority of kings. Sir George Yeardley’s house of bur¬ 
gesses was functioning as early as 1619, and from a strictly 
constitutional point of view probably was usurping the func¬ 
tions of the English parliament. 

In the Massachusetts Bay colony, too, the settlers speedily 
took charge of their own affairs. It was nothing to them that 
Winthrop and his council were the legal government. The 
outsiders demanded to be let in, on threat of going elsewhere 















Shall This Government Live or Die? 


23 


and setting up a colony of their own. They were let in, ex¬ 
actly as the ancient kings of England had been compelled to 
let their subjects in on the government. The same contest 
was going on that had gone on then, only in the colonies the 
resistance of authority was less and the contest was more 
quickly determined in favor of the governed. 

In 1639 the “Orders of Connecticut,” the first of Amer¬ 
ica’s written constitutions, was adopted by , the towns of Wind¬ 
sor, Hartford and Wethersfield, and this document, too, prob¬ 
ably would be hard to reconcile with the pretensions of the 
king’s government. The colonial constitution was simply get¬ 
ting ahead of the English constitution. The Massachusetts 
Body of Liberties, following the Connecticut Orders within two 
years, was just another evidence of the same process. The 
colonists were taking their government into their own hands 
and putting things in writing. The slower processed of con¬ 
stitutional growth in England did not meet the necessities of 
these wilderness commonwealths. They could *,iiot wait to 
negotiate with the king; instead of asking they took, and far 
better than Englishmen at home they knew what Aey wanted. 
The second generation of them could boast: 

“We have long drunk of the cup of as great liberties as 
any people that we can hear of under the whole heaven.” 

It was true, and the cup was a little heady. 

The colonial assemblies made much shorter work of the 
royal governors than the English parliament made of the 
king. No reproof from a governor could cause a Virginia 
burgess to stand silent and abashed in his place or to sit down 
and burst into tears, as did Sir John Eliot in the English par¬ 
liament. Because a member of the English parliament had 
said of a royal speech, “We are Englishmen, and not to be 
frightened by a few high words,” he was sent to the tower. 

But the colonial assemblies were free from the start, and 
were in this respect all that the English parliament merely 
claimed to be. They ruled the colonies and left little more for 
the governors to do than rend the heavens with their protests. 

While that English parliament in which men like Eliot 
and Prynne sat helpless and saw it dissolved; and all through 
that long period when no parliament sat in England, assem¬ 
blies in America not only were legislating, but usually legis¬ 
lating in opposition to the will and wishes of the authority 
representing the crown. 

Increase Mather spoke the truth. “There never was,” 
he said, “a generation that did so perfectly shake off the dust 
of Babylon both as to ecclesiastical and civil constitution, as 
did the first generation * * * that came into this land.” 


24 


What of America? 


They (the Americans) can never he united into one 
compact empire under any species of government what¬ 
ever; a disunited people till the end of time, suspicious 
and distrustful of each other, they will be divided and 
subdivided into little commonwealths or principalities, 
according to national boundaries, by great bays of the 
sea, and by vast rivers, lakes and ridges of mountains .— 
Josiah Tucker, dean of Gloucester. 

VII. 


Why Unity and Nationality Were of Slow Growth. 

E HAVE seen how the development of democratic 
institutions among the American colonists took 
its course from the circumstances in which they 
' were placed. Their numbers were few and scat¬ 
tered, they were separated from the mother 
country by an ocean it took two months to cross. 
Their government, welfare and defense were 
thus thrown, to a large extent, into their own hands. In this 
situation, with neither king nor parliament to help or hinder 
much, they sought the direct application to their necessities 
of those principles which at home were still pretty much in a . 
state of theory. It made little difference to the colonists 
whether a certain power of government belonged to the king 
or to the parliament. If they needed it they used it. 

This familiarity with the processes of government was 
something no ^English community could attain, and it was a 
natural result that in the course of a cen^ry Americans were 
much more politically educated than the English, and that 
English institutions in America were in a much more flourish¬ 
ing state than they were in the land where they first took root. 

The bantlings were cast on the rock and had to learn to 
shift for themselves. They learned so well how to do it that they 
not only shifted without the mother country, but without each 
other. This is a fact to remember as we, go on, for unity was 
to be a slow growth and ;nationality a slower. The status of 
the colonies differed; some were royal and some proprietary, 
and until toward the close of the seventeenth century the 
English at the north and south were separated from each 
other by the Dutch. 

The one necessity they had in common was defense, and 
so early as 1643 the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecti¬ 
cut and New Haven colonies formed a defensive union against 
the Dutch, French and Indians. But unity never was an 














Shall This Government Live or Die? 25 

American idea. The first suggestion of it, in fact, came from 
the English government which urged a union at the beginning 
of the French and Indian war, more than a century after the 
New England colonies had tried their first experiment. A 
plan was drawn up- by Benjamin Franklin and submitted to 
the Albany convention in 1754. It provided for a union of all 
the English colonies with a common legislative assembly and 
an executive called a president-general. But the idea was too 
startling for the times and awoke apprehensions all around; 
both the crown and the colonies rejected it. 

These early' indications are important to note, for they 
point us to the character of the political development that 
was going on. Each colony regarded itself as independent 
of the others, and it was during this early period that the idea 
of local self government took its firm root. Another thing that 
kept the colonies apart was the diverse character of the immi¬ 
gration that came from England. ^With the defeat of Charles 
large numbers of royalists came to the colonies, settling mostly 
in the South. The Puritian immigration had been to the north. 
Between these two groups there was something of the feeling 
that had kindled the fires of civil war in England; a feeling 
that derived partly from class and partly from religion. It 
was to remain, under ^changing forms and with important re¬ 
sults, for many generations. 

Yet there was a process going on that in the end was to 
overcome all these difficulties. As Englishmen these neighbors 
might be Cavaliers or Roundheads, Churchmen, Separatists or 
Quakers, but as colonists they were Americans. Nationality 
was at work though unsuspected. Just as Normans in the 
twelfth century became Englishmen because they were cut 
off from their own land and shut up on an island, so English¬ 
men in the eighteenth century, isolated on a continent with an 
ocean on one side and a wilderness on the other, became 
Americans. 

But we must not think of them as being neighbors in any 
ordinary sense. In Virginia there were rigid distinctions of 
class. Here was a country life aristocracy that lived on scat¬ 
tered plantations and built no towns. What towns there were 
consisted of a court house and a church. Nobody lived in the 
towns, because there was nothing there to support life. A 
town with a store in it was a rarity—at the most there would 
be a blacksmith shop. This was true of Virginia generally 
for more than a hundred years after its settlement; even its 
capital, Williamsburg—a college town to boot—had as late 
as 1750 only two brick houses. There were no roads and no 
trade except that overseas, and the James River was the high¬ 
way to the sea. That this aloof country life of the Southerners 
had its political influence in after centuries is one of the out¬ 
standing facts in our history. 


26 What of America? 

But where Virginia had parishes as the local political 
unit, Massachusetts had towns, and consequently a different 
social life. Political contacts also would be closer. In New 
England the town was in a sense the product of legislation, as 
this ordinance of the Plymouth authorities witnesses: “Noe 
“dwelling-howse shal be builte above halfe a myle from the 
“meeting-howse in any newe plantacion without leave from 
“the court, except mylle-howses.” This would bring the set¬ 
tlers clustering pretty closely about the church. Gregarious¬ 
ness made for trade, and the New Englanders were craftsmen 
and shopkeepers rather than planters. Perhaps it was for 
similar reasons that they became so powerful in conversation 
—^they had a government of talk. All of New England was a 
parliament. 

Where South Carolina started out with a plan of govern¬ 
ment devised by a couple of English philosophers—Locke and 
Shaftesbury—with orders of nobility all neatly ranged, New 
England began as a thorough democracy, its government be¬ 
ing administered by mass meetings where all public laws and 
regulations were made. Here was no delegated authority, 
every citizen appearing and speaking for himself. Nothing 
like this was known in England. Only when the New Eng¬ 
land colonies spread beyond the bounds of a single settlement 
was the representative system introduced. Then we see local 
legislatures everywhere, and with them the growing idea that 
they provided all the government the colonies needed. Even 
this early centralization was an idea repugnant to democratic 
thinking, and was to grow more so, as we shall see. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


27 


A government is not free to do as it pleases * * * 
the law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, 
legislators as well as others .—John Locke. 

The true wisdom of nations is experience. —Napo¬ 
leon. 

The laws of England, I know, are sufficient to 
make me as great a king as I could wish to be .—James 11. 

VIII. 


The Growing Conflict Between Governors and Governed. 


ITH so many colonial parliaments functioning; with 
royal governors and proprietary governors ad¬ 
ministering executive authority; and with some 
colonies—as Rhode Island and Connecticut— 
claiming to be absolutely self-governing under 
their charters, and others admitting dependence 
on English authority, it is not remarkable that 
confusion early arose over the constitutional status of the dif¬ 
ferent communities. Rhode Island and Connecticut undoubt¬ 
edly had charters entitling them to home government, if that 
should mean anything; Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware 
had proprietors whose rights seemed above question. Penn had 
bought Pennsylvania outright for £16,000, surrendering a 
valid and recognized claim against the English government for 
that amount, which he had inherited from his father. Lord 
Baltimore had only to pay the king an annual tribute of two 
arrowheads for Maryland. Massachusetts, New York, New 
Hampshire, Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia and the Carolinas 
acknowledged their origin as royal colonies, but gradually 
came to have their own ideas as to just what that meant. 

Moreover there had been a revolution in England in 1689. 
The royal house that had granted the American charters was 
driven out and a new house, with which the English people 
made much better terms for themselves than they had en¬ 
joyed under the Stuarts, came in. The new measure of civil 
liberty that had come to Englishmen at home should extend 
to Englishmen in America, the colonists argued. 

By the middle of the eighteenth century the public agi¬ 
tation of questions that concerned their government and its 
relation to the crown, had become marked among the colonists, 
particularly among the New Englanders. A French traveler 
said of them: 

“They are all politicians down to the housemaids, and 
read two newspapers a day.*^ 
















28 


What of America? 


It is recorded that when Blackstone's commentaries came 
out in 1758 there was a tremendous demand for the book in 
the colonies. Everybody seemed interested in questions of law 
and government. A Virginian traveling in New England re¬ 
marked in his letters on the extreme inquisitiveness and talk¬ 
ativeness of the Northern people. If he stopped at an inn he 
was immediately surrounded and questioned as to his iden¬ 
tity, his business, and as to what news he brought. 

A people thus politically minded was not likely to sleep 
on its rights. The colonists had, in fact, enjoyed so much 
liberty that the slightest apparent restrictions on them at once 
roused their apprehension. The English colonial policy had 
for long periods been one described as wise neglect; the col¬ 
onies had been left alone to tax themselves and quarrel with 
their royal governors, but this comfortable course was inter¬ 
rupted at times by fits of meddling by king, minister or par¬ 
liament, and on these occasions the colonies never failed to 
show quick alarm. 

Thus when Governor Andros fought to forfeit the Charter 
of Connecticut he met with the stoutest resistance. Ail New 
England fought the tyrannical governor until they brought 
about his fall. Massachusetts, as early as 1652, denied the 
right of parliament to change her charter, and, Puritan though 
she was, refused to proclaim Cromwell and his son Richard. 
Massachussets even asserted the right to coin her own money. 

In Virginia the assembly refused to submit its records to 
the examination of Culpeper, the royal governor, and under 
him and many succeeding governors continued to wage a 
contest, more or less successful, for larger rights of self 
government. 

In Pennsylvania a continuous struggle went on between 
the assembly and the deputies commissioned by Penn to govern 
for him. Even when the colony was taken over by a royal 
governor, during Penn’s troubles with the English government, 
the assembly refused to contribute money for the war in which 
King William was engaged with France. 

New York’s history was still more turbulent. It was 
Dutch until 1664, and Dutch again for a short period a few 
years later. But its permanent occupation by the English was 
soon followed by civil war, when a faction of the colonists, led 
by Jacob Leisler, seized the government and refused to 
submit to the royal authority. Governor Sloughter, to whom 
Leisler finally surrendered, hanged him and some of his fol¬ 
lowers. But the colony was not pacified, and under the rule of 
successive governors continued a prey to contesting factions 
for many years. 

All this history, and it was of like character throughout 
the colonies, tends to one conclusion. Government, good or 
bad—and in the main it was bad—bestowed from England was 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 29 

everywhere coming to be regarded as an invasion of colonial 
liberties. The colonies wanted to govern themselves; each 
colony wanted to govern itself independently of the others. 
They wanted, each for itself, to concentrate all government 
in the locally elected assemblies. Above all they recognized 
no taxing power but that of the assembly. The people re¬ 
garded themselves as English subjects, but entitled to the 
kind of government their situation demanded. They had 
carved out their colonies -from the wilderness and the fruits 
of their work were their own. Too often the royal governors 
were mere adventurers, royal favorites come to mend their 
fortunes, ruined at the gaming tables of London, and these 
rapacious rulers were held to be little better than public ene¬ 
mies. England’s wise neglect when interrupted by unwise in¬ 
terference, was rapidly alienating a loyalty that, at best, was 
little calculated to withstand the time and distance that sep¬ 
arated the colonists from the land and the political system of 
their forefathers. The bonds that held them to the mother 
country had been stretched taut. Only wise statesmanship in 
England could now keep them from snapping. 

The circumstance to which the colonies owed their large 
freedom of action during the seventeenth century is one not 
always understood. It was during that century that England’s 
Stuart kings were attempting to fasten absolutism on that 
country. The Stuarts were the enemies of English liberty, but 
by one of the strange paradoxes of history were the unwitting 
friends of colonial liberty. 

It was because their hands were full at home that they 
did not lay them on the colonies. James I, who had granted 
the first colonial charters, died before the colonies had taken 
root. Charles I came to the throne and began a contest with 
his people that occupied all his attention. His policy came to 
be expressed in the single word, 'Thorough,” the word of his^ 
able and ambitious minister, Thomas Wentworth, earl of' 
Strafford, who paid with his head for inventing it. If 
“Thorough” had been successful in England Charles would 
have applied the system to America, but after a contest of a 
quarter of a century, during which the colonies had no place 
in the minds of struggling king or parliament, Charles, too, 
paid with his head. 

The commonwealth succeeded and gave new strength to 
the civil and religious liberties of Englishmen at home and in 
America. Two more Stuarts were to follow, one more con¬ 
cerned with affairs of the heart than with affairs of the state, 
and one who tried to revive absolutism and lost his throne in 
the attempt. Charles II, who was chasing a moth about the 
room with a lady’s slipper while the Dutch were burning ship¬ 
ping in the Thames, was not likely to bother his head about 
what Englishmen were doing in Massachusetts and Virginia. 


30 


What of America? 


James II, last of the Stuarts, had only one idea in his somewhat 
thick head, and that was to place the authority of the crown 
above the laws of England. In his pursuit of that object it 
took him just three years to alienate parliament, aristocracy, 
church and nation. All arose against him and he fled to 
France, throwing the great seal into the Thames as he went. 

These brothers, Charles and James, “Belial and Moloch,^' 
and their father, Charles I, misgoverned England for a half 
century, but England kept them so busy doing it that the Eng¬ 
lish colonists during that time virtually governed themselves. 
By the beginning of the eighteenth century the political 
institutions of the colonies had grown strong enough to bear 
the strain of the royal governors whom Anne and the Georges 
sent over, the Cornburys, the Androses, the Fletchers, the Cul¬ 
pepers—that run of court favorites that Sam Adams called 
“haughty bashaws,” which seems to have been the way he 
spelled pashas in his haste. 

The political history of the colonies during the first three- 
quarters of the eighteenth century is the history of the at¬ 
tempt of these royal governors to suppress the provincial as¬ 
semblies by limiting their activities to the passing of supply 
bills. It was the history of the English kings and their par¬ 
liaments over again. The governors alternately begged and 
threatened. They dismissed assemblies, they called them 
back. They got money for public purposes and put it in their 
pockets. “Their office,” says Franklin, “makes them insolent; 
their insolence makes them odious; and, being conscious that 
they are hated, they become malicious. Their malice urges 
them to continual abuse of the inhabitants in letters (to the 
ministry), representing them as disaffected and rebellious, and 
as weak, divided, timid and cowardly. Government believes 
all; thinks it necessary to support and countenance its offi¬ 
cers. Their quarreling with the people is deemed a mark 
and consequence of their fidelity. They are therefore more 
highly rewarded, and this makes their conduct still more in¬ 
solent and provoking.” 

Some of them tried blandishments, the failure of which 
reminds of James IFs attempt to win the rebel Ayloffe, caught 
in Monmouth’s uprising. 

“You had better be frank with me, Mr. Ayloffe,” said the 
king when the captive was brought before him, “you know it 
is in my power to pardon you.” 

“It may be in your power,” replied Ayloffe, “but it is not 
in your nature.” 

The colonial assemblies had learned it was not in the na¬ 
ture of the English pashas to give good government. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


31 


He who shall propose it {to tax the colonies) will he 
a much holder man than /.—Walpole. 


IX. 


The Character of George III and His Government. 


HE event that embarked the English government 
upon the course that led in a few swift years to 
the loss of the American colonies was the acces¬ 
sion to the throne of King George III, which oc¬ 
curred in 1760. If we are to understand the his¬ 
tory of the colonial crises that marked the open¬ 
ing of the reign of this king, we must know 
something of his character and government and of the political, 
state of England at the time. 

George took a. view of his kingship that had been un¬ 
known to the English constitution for generations; that never 
had been recognized, in fact, and that had been abandoned 
by every ruler who had sat on the throne since the expul¬ 
sion of the Stuarts. George set himself from the beginning to 
the policy of instituting a personal rule in which the ministry 
and parliament should be reduced to nullities. He surrounded 
himself with courtiers and favorites who fawned on him and 
did his bidding, and the views of these men—which were 
merely his own handed back to him embellished with every 
flattery—outweighed the advice of statesmen and generals. 

The narrow understanding of the king never grasped the 
colonial problem. He could see no difference between the at¬ 
titude of three million Englishmen in America demanding their 
rights, and that of the Middlesex electors in insisting on send¬ 
ing John Wilkes to parliament in opposition to the king’s 
wishes. He treated both as rebels. He would have treated • 
his parliamentary opposition in the same way if he could have 
seen a way to do it. 

To the king any Englishman at home or in America who 
raised a voice against the administration of his government 
v/as another Wilkes. Samuel Adams, James Otis, John Han¬ 
cock—every American who wasn’t a Tory—were Wilkites. 
They were his personal enemies and libelers, and should be 
outlawed as Wilkes was. George, like James H, had no use 
for character, principles or ability in a general, minister or 
member of parliament, if they could not be bent to his per- 


















32 


What of America? 


sonal use. All such qualities therefore were driven from 
places near the throne; and the government, the army and 
crown offices in America were filled with royal pages, nien 
with just ability enough to keep on the right side of the king 
by telling him the things he wanted to believe. John Stuart, 
earl of Bute, known to the people as jackboot, was an example 
of this class. Of him Prince Frederic said, “Bute is just the 
man to be envoy at some small proud German court where 
there is nothing to do.” The character, both of George and 
Grenville, his stamp act minister, is well illustrated by 
the remark of Macaulay that neither the king nor Grenville 
could bear to be governed by the other, but were perfectly 
agreed as to how to govern anybody else. 

The political and social state of England made it easy 
for George to institute this regime. Parliament was con¬ 
trolled by a few powerful families who parceled out seats 
in the house of commons to their supporters and tools. In 
other words, the seats were bought and sold almost openly. 
Their prices were quoted pretty much as stocks were quoted 
on the exchange, and we can read these prices today in the 
memoirs of the times. 

“A note,” writes Lord North to the secretary of the board 
of treasury, “should be written to Lord Falmouth in my name. 
His lordship must be told that I hope he will permit me to 
recommend to three of his six seats in Cornwall. The terms 
he expects are £2,500 a seat, to which I am ready to agree.” 

“Gascoigne,” he writes again, “should have the refusal 
of Tregony if he will pay £1,000. If he will not pay he must 
give way to Mr. Best or Mr. Peachy.” 

Again: “Let Cooper know whether you promised Master- 
man £2,500 or £3,000 for each of Lord Edgecumbe’s seats. 
I was going to pay him 12,500 pounds, but he demands 
15,000.” 

The majorities thus returned to parliament took their 
orders, of course; and their voice was graciously accepted by 
the king as the voice of his people. There was no other 
voice in England, for the king would not permit petitions to 
be presented to the throne, and frowned on all public meet¬ 
ings, resolutions and addresses in which his subjects had a 
part. Even when the city of Manchester (which, by the way, 
had no representatives in parliament) presented a most loyal 
and dutiful address to the king, exhibiting a spirit which he 
commended to Lord North, he nevertheless warned that min¬ 
ister that it was a bad precedent. 

The people of England thus had no share in their own 
government. A privileged class returned to parliament by 
votes controlled by the great landed families, represented 
communities in which their faces, and perhaps their names, 
were unknown. Many constituencies so represented had no 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 33 

population at all, if we except the gamekeepers and grooms of 
the family that owned the land. On the other hand, many 
great industrial towns had no representation at all, the aris¬ 
tocracy of government being almost exclusively the aristoc¬ 
racy of the land. 

Even the opposition in parliament represented no nation¬ 
al political party or feeling. Its leaders, with a very few ex¬ 
ceptions, were merely political opponents of the king’s minis¬ 
ters and wanted nothing but those ministers’ places. In of¬ 
fice they, too, would have beem “the king’s friends;” out of 
office they were merely the opposition biding their time. 
Nor was the king above trafficing with the opposition leaders 
and intriguing against his own ministers when it suited his 
policy to do so. He hated Pitt, but he called Pitt to office 
the better to- discipline his chosen tools. Never was states¬ 
manship in England so low, never were her ancient liberties 
so nearly extinguished as when George III was perfecting his 
repressive system against his subjects, both at home and in the 
colonies. The character of the government he meant to build up, 
and incidentally his own stubborness, are illustrated by the 
declaration with which he received Pitt’s proposal to restore 
constitutional government. 

“Rather than submit to the terms proposed by Mr. Pitt, 
I would die in the room I now stand in.” 

Such was the character of the king and such the political 
condition of the country he ruled when, after nearly a cen- 
ture and a half of colonial self-government, the relation of 
these dependencies to the crown suddenly presented a question 
to which no answer could be found in the history of English 
government. 


34 


What of America? 


If the king of Great Britain in person were encamped 
on Boston Common, at the head of 20,000 men, with all 
his navy on our coast, he would not he able to execute 
these laws. —James Otis. 


X. 


The Stamp Act Leads to the First Step Toward Colonial Unity. 

REPRESSIVE policy against the colonies that be¬ 
gan as early as the year George III ascended the 
throne took the form of writs of assistance, so 
called, by which crown officers were empowered 
to search the private dwellings of the colonists 
for smuggled goods. James Otis, a Boston law¬ 
yer employed by the crown, threw up his com¬ 
mission rather than appear for the English government in 
these cases. He took the colonists’ case and, in an argument 
before the Massachusetts court, shivered the crown’s preten¬ 
sions to bits. 

“Then and there,” said John Adams, “the trumpet of the 
Revolution was sounded.” 

The royal commissioners of the revenue soon found all the 
legal talent in the colonies was on the other side. Every 
American lawyer, it was complained, was a patriot, and every 
patriot thought he was a lawyer. Nor was this much of an 
exaggeration. General Gage, when he tried to billet troops 
on the Boston population a few years later, was amazed at 
the knowledge every citizen displayed of the legal points 
involved. 

“I am in a country where everybody seems to know the 
law,” he angrily declared. 

An English attorney general, equally baffled, said the 
Americans were so well versed in the crown law that they 
knew how to shave treason by a hair. 

In his speech of conciliation Burke paid the Americans 
a more honest compliment on their study of the laws that 
governed them. “This study,” he said, “renders men acute, 
inquisitive, dexterous, full of resources. In other countries the 
people, more simple, judge an ill principle in government only 
by an actual grievance; in America they anticipate the evil, 
and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of 
the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance, and 
snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” 
















Shall This Government Live or Die? 


35 


But the first broad view we get of the differences that 
were to widen into conflict between the colonies and the 
mother country, is presented by the action of the congress 
that assembled in New York in 1765 to remonstrate against 
the new theory on which 'the English government was pro¬ 
ceeding. 

The specific thing that brought this congress together 
was the Stamp Act by which parliament had required the 
Americans to purchase stamped paper for use in business trans¬ 
actions. It was a direct, new and obnoxiously obtrusive tax, 
obnoxiously collected. The attempt to collect it had roused 
violent opposition. The collectors were mobbed wherever they 
appeared, forced to flee, arrested and made to resign their 
offices. Consignments of the stamped paper were seized in 
many towns and burned amid the wildest popular demonstra¬ 
tions. 

Parliament had passed this law, says the English his¬ 
torian, Green, with less opposition than would have been 
brought out by a turnpike bill. It was a characteristic act of 
a government that knew less about America than the king 
knew about the English constitution. 

The resolutions adopted at the New York congress set 
forth the American position in a new and startling way. The 
colonies refused to stand any longer on their charters merely, 
but asserted instead the rights, as Englishmen, of the people 
dwelling in them. 

“Our charter,” said James Otis, “is in our inherent rights 
as men.” 

“The people,” said John Adams, “have rights antecedent 
to all earthly government.” 

This was parliamentary rhetoric, for there was excite¬ 
ment in the air. 

The congress’s sober work was to make a declaration of 
rights, the solid matter of which was that the king’s subjects 
in the colonies were standing on the English constitution and 
on their rights as Englishmen; that as Englishmen no taxes 
could be imposed on them without their consent; that it was 
impossible from their location that they should be represented 
in parliament and that, therefore, they could be lawfully 
taxed only by their own legislative assemblies in which they 
were represented. The congress also protested against the 
extension of the admiralty laws over the colonies, by which in 
effect Americans had been deprived of the right of trial by 
jury. 

We may regard this congress of 1765 as the first step 
toward the formation of the United States. The colonies now 
had a common cause and could stand together. Virginia, 
by its assembly, had led off with a declaration against the 
pretensions of parliament, and Massachusetts had accepted 


36 


What of America! 


this declaration as presenting its own views and coupled with 
its adoption the call to all the colonies to meet and take united 
action. The congress was presided over by Timothy Ruggles 
of Massachusetts and John Rutledge of South Carolina led 
the debate on the floor. North and South were one when 
the liberties of both were threatened. 

One statesman in England saw what this action meant. 
Pitt was not in parliament when the Stamp Act was 
passed, but he returned to the house in the following session 
when the news of American resistance had brought the minis¬ 
try to the necessity of considering the repeal of the act. 
^‘America is almost in open rebellion,” he warned the house. 
‘'Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of 
people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to 
submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make 
slaves of the rest.” 

It was these words of Pitt that caused George III to call 
him a trumpet of sedition. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


37 


The new king (George III), having the most exalted 
notion of his own authority, and being, from his mis¬ 
erable education, entirely ignorant of public affairs, 
thought that to tax the Americans for the benefit of the 
English would be a masterpiece of policy. —Thomas 
Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England. 

XI. 

The King Decides to Teach America a Lesson. 


E colonies followed up the action of the Stamp Act 
congress by forming associations to boycott Eng¬ 
lish goods, and non-importation agreements came 
everywhere into effect. The English merchants 
were struck with dismay. To them a colony was 
a market, and nothing else. A closed market meant 
loss and ruin. They promptly brought pressure 
on parliament, and that body found itself between two fires. It 
met the situation by the adoption of a policy characteristic of the 
statesmanship of the times. It repealed the Stamp Act to placate 
the clamoring traders at home, and at the same time passed a 
declaratory act asserting its right to tax the colonies if it wanted 
to. No principle was settled. 

Parliament had acted as the ancient kings sometimes acted 
when put in a corner. They sometimes made concessions ‘‘of 
grace.'' By that they meant, “I'm not doing this because I have 
to, but because I'm good natured. Now, run .away and play." 

Parliament was not long in testing its asserted powers. It 
soon passed an act to raise revenue on certain articles imported 
by the colonies, and to use this money to pay the salaries of 
colonial officials appointed by the crown. This was not only to 
tax the colonies, but to deprive them of the election and control 
of their own officials. The English government called this a 
civil list. The Americans saw in it the destruction of self govern¬ 
ment, and a pension roll, which they were to pay. 

At the same time the king's government decided to punish 
New York for refusing to make provision for the maintenance of 
an English garrison, and suspended its legislature. As the other 
colonies had been making it as difficult as possible for the king's 
troops to find quarters, this action was a notice of what all might 
expect. 















38 


AV H A T OF 


America f 


In Massachusetts Samuel Adams, whom the English and 
Tories called "‘Maltster Sam,’' in allusion to his early occupation, 
drew up a petition to the king which the assembly adopted, and 
urged the other colonies to support. This petition excited the 



SAMUEL ADAMS. 


indignation of the king, and the assembly was instructed to with¬ 
draw it. This it refused to do, and the assembly was suspended. 

The Virginia burgesses suffered the same fate when they 
adopted resolutions aimed at parliament’s taxing power. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


39 


The colonies were now in active correspondence; their atti¬ 
tude was resolute; the suspended assemblies came together again 
as popular conventions and a strong agitation continued every¬ 
where against the new taxes and the presence of troops. 

In the face of this opposition the ministers again tried their 
previous experiment; they decided to repeal the taxes but retain 
the principle. With this view they notified the colonies the port 
duties would be lifted on all the articles that had been named in 
the new act, except on tea. Tea was excepted to assert the prin¬ 
ciple. The colonies retorted by asserting a principle of their 
own, and refused to drink tea. A cargo sent to Boston was seized 
by some persons who were dressed like Indians but acted like 
Bostonians, and thrown overboard. 

The English crown got $1,500 a year from this tax on tea 
and lost thirteen colonies. 

Conflicts between citizens and soldiers now became frequent 
wherever the troops were quartered, the feeling culminating in 
what came to be known throughout the colonies as the “Boston 
Massacre'^ when a clash in the streets of that town resulted in the 
death of five civilians. 

The clear fact that now must be recognized is that King 
George and those in his government who passed by the naifie of 
the “king's friends” were angry and had made up their minds, 
as a British historian puts it, to pay the colonies out. They meant 
to punish them. They proceeded to introduce in parliament, and 
parliament proceeded to pass with the most amazing levity, a 
series of penal measures against Boston and Massachusetts. The 
port was closed and additional regiments of troops sent to the 
city. The colony's charter was forfeited and in its place was 
instituted arbitrary crown rule. Town meetings were abolished. 
Juries were to be drawn by sheriffs who owed their places to 
the crown's favor. Citizens were, in specified cases, to be trans¬ 
ported to England for trial, on the ground that justice was ob¬ 
structed in the colony, notwithstanding that Boston had just given 
a signal illustration of the quality of its justice by acquitting, at 
the hands of a jury of its own citizens, the commanding officer 
of the troops that had fired on the people. 

These penal measures, by which the king's government 
tossed away the fairest portion of the British empire, were put 
through a house of commons that jeered at and howled down the 
few voices that were raised in protest. George himself com¬ 
placently fancied he had settled the whole vexing bustness. He 
had been talking to General Gage, who had assured him the 
Americans would yield. 

“He says,” the king wrote to Lord North, “they will be 
lyons whilst we are lambs; but, if we take the resolute part, 
they will undoubtedly prove very weak.” 

“Blows,” said the obstinate king, “must decide.” 

Blows did. 


40 


What of America! 


The whole of your political condicct has been one 
continued series of weakness, temerity, despotism, ignor¬ 
ance, futility, negligence, blundering, and the most no¬ 
torious servility, incapacity and corruption .—The earl of 
Chatham to the British ministry. 

XII. 


The Shot That Was Heard Round the World. 

HE result of the coercive measures taken by the 
crown was a continental congress that met in 
Philadelphia in September, 1774, and its temper 
soon showed the colonies regarded the cause of 
Massachusetts as their own. The congress strength¬ 
ened the nonimportation agreements, adopted a 
declaration of rights in which it was again in¬ 
sisted that the colonies stood on the English constitution, and 
drew up addresses to the king and the people of Great Britain, 
in which firmness was blended with loyalty. No word of separa¬ 
tion was uttered. 

But a new parliamentary election had occurred in Britain in 
which the “king’s friends” were triumphant. That is to say, the 
prices for seat in it had been agreed upon between the sellers and 
the purchasers. The opposition was stilled; the American peti¬ 
tions were rejected; the elated king was to have his blows. Lord 
Howe was sent out with a fleet, and William Howe, Burgoyne 
and Clinton were commissioned to take command of the land 
forces. Lord Howe also was to have the role of negotiator and 
present some proposals Lord North had included with the gov¬ 
ernment’s more warlike orders. But nothing was to come of 
these last minute reservations. The train of war was laid, and 
there was wanting only the spark. 

During the winter of 1774-5 Boston, closed to trade and 
under military rule, was but the ghost of a town. Food and fuel 
were scarce, and though the British offered employment on bar¬ 
racks and fortifications they were erecting the citizens refused 
it and lived on a ration of rice and salt fish distributed by the 
American committee. The British officers were confident and 
provocative. Re-enforcements arrived steadily and the troops 
were frequently paraded on the common to give the townspeople 
an object lesson in Britain’s might. The patriots were watched 
closely. When the people gathered to commemorate the anni- 

















Shall This Government Live or Die? 


*41 


versary of the Boston massacre, as had been their annual custom, 
British officers attended and jeered and hooted the speakers. On 
the day of prayer and fasting ordered by the continental con¬ 
gress the British bands were turned out and taking station before 
the churches blared away with all their power in an attempt to 
play down the preachers. The houses of the patriots were marked 
and the soldiers, without hindrance from their officers, amused 
themselves with insulting demonstrations before the doors and 
by throwing stones through the windows. 

During these months General Gage had sent out officers dis¬ 
guised as countrymen to observe the activities of the patriots 
and to sketch the roads in the vicinity of Boston. Receiving in¬ 
formation that the Americans were collecting military stores 
in various places he determined, as spring opened up, to strike 
a salutary terror into these zealous provincials by swooping down 
on these depots and destroying them. A first expedition made 
against Salem was fruitless. A detachment of soldiers reaching 



THE KING'S TROOPS, MARCHING ON CONCORD, WERE MET AT LEXINGTON BY 
THE MASSACHUSETTS MINUTE-MEN, AND THERE, ON APRIL 19, 1775, THE 
FIRST BATTLE OF THE REVOLUTION WAS FOUGHT. 

(From an old print.) 


there on a Sunday morning, the church congregations turned out, 
raised a drawbridge that gave entrance to the town and thus 
barred the path of the troops. There was parley and some show 
of force, but in the end the British officer, a little uncertain of 
his orders, gave the word to retire. 

But in April Gage decided on a show of greater firmness. 
Preparations were made to send a strong column to Concord 
where stores were supposed to be collected. Secrecy was ob¬ 
served and swiftness enjoined. The column moved out at mid- 























What of America! 


42 • 


night and began its march of twenty miles through Middlesex. 
But secret and swift as the troops were a word more secret and 
swift went before them. Joseph Warren who had information of 
the expedition had stationed Paul Revere on the Middlesex side, 
and when the route of the troops was known, this stout patriot 
with his horse as stout, had only to wait the signal flashed from 
the tower of the Old North church. When it came he galloped 
away to Lexington where Hancock and Sam Adams, the proscribed 
patriots, were in hiding, rousing the minutemen as he sped. The 
British column marched all night, but everywhere ahead of them 
the word had flown and the minute-men were concentrating at 
Lexington, six miles from Concord and in the path of the ad¬ 
vancing redcoats. 

Some seventy of the militia had gathered there on the town 
common when, at 4 o’clock in the morning, the British marched 
in and for the first time in history the armed forces of the 
mother country and the colonies confronted each other. 

There, in the half light of dawn on the morning of April 19, 
1775, a crash of musketry ushered in the American Revolution. 

Seven Americans fell dead, and as many more were wounded. 
The British continued to Concord where they destroyed some 
property not clearly of a military nature, and there the men of 
Concord and Acton withstood them at "‘the rude bridge that 
arched the flood.” Volleys rolled from both sides; the British 
fell back leaving dead; the Americans held the bridge. 

But now the countryside was up. The fast gathering militia 
invested the British line of retreat to Lexington and poured in 
on the column a steady and accurate fire. At Lexington re-en¬ 
forcements met the column, but the Americans still gathered 
and the British seemed doomed when Lord Percy, who had brought 
up the fresh troops from Boston, succeeded in placing some field 
pieces in such a way as to give brief respite from the close pres¬ 
sure of the Americans. All day the British retreated and the 
fighting continued, Percy’s men suffering heavily, going without 
food or water throughout the march. At dark when the beaten 
and demoralized British reached haven at Boston, the retreat was 
a rout. As it was, the survivors barely escaped being cut off and 
captured, for the last of them had not been within the British 
lines half an hour when a large body of militia from Salem ana 
Marblehead appeared at a point where they must have completely 
cut off the entire British force. 

The impression the English people received of these battles 
that opened the Revolution, may be inferred from the fact that 
the London Gazette in its account of them reported that the 
Americans had scalped the British wounded. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


43 


Let our object be our country, our whole country, 
and nothing but our country. —Daniel Webster, at the 
laying of the corner stone of Bunker Hill monument. 

The past, at least, is secure .—Daniel Webster, reply 
to Hayne. 

XIII. 


Bunker Hill Supplies Some Information for Lord Sandwich. 

HE shots at Lexington and Concord, if they were 
not heard round the world, at least were heard 
throughout New England and the colonies; and 
almost without orders the provincial militia got 
under march for Boston. These forces gathered 
steadily through the next six weeks, and early in 
June an army in numbers if not in equipment in¬ 
vested the city and Gage’s occupying force. 

Israel Putnam, ‘^Old Put,” as he came to be known, brought 
up the Connecticut men. Rather, he told the men to follow and 
set out himself alone, covering a hundred miles in eighteen hours 
without changing horses. From Rhode Island came Nathanael 
Greene with a force that the assembly of those plantations au¬ 
thorized to go and look on—at least, Rhode Island was not at first 
prepared to do more. The New Hampshire minute men are 
reputed to have run from the Menvmac to Cambridge. At any 
rate they got over fifty-five miles of road in something like nine¬ 
teen hours after “refreshments” at Andover. What they might 
have done on a full meal history can only guess at. 

The American besieging force numbered in June some 
seventeen thousand men and was commanded by General Ward, 
or more accurately by a committee of safety of the Massachusetts 
congress. To this committee it seemed essential that the Charles¬ 
town heights should be occupied, and this suggestion was made 
to a council of war which included Ward, Warren and Putnam. 
Opinion was divided, but the enterprise was agreed upon. Singu¬ 
larly enough the British, almost at the same time, had decided 
to occupy Dorchester Heights. But the Americans were before¬ 
hand, and the night of June 16, Colonel Prescott, with a force of 
fifteen hundred men who carried spades as well as firelocks, 
occupied Bunker Hill and before dawn of the 17th had thrown 
up a line of intrenchments six feet high. These works were fully 
exposed to and within easy range of both the British land bat¬ 
teries and their ships. 













44 


What of America? 


The British had no choice but to assault the hill, because if 
the Americans were allowed to strengthen the position with ar¬ 
tillery they could command the town. Ships and batteries at 
once opened on the redoubt with a heavy cannonade, but the fire, 
which continued all the forenoon, failed to drive the Americans 
out. They had few cannon of their own, and could only lie low 



JOSEPH WARREN.* 


and wait for the infantry attack they knew must follow. Pres¬ 
cott's men, weary with a night of digging, without water and 
with little food, had a main redoubt of fifty yards’ length to de¬ 
fend and a hundred yards of breastwork extending to one side 
toward the shore of the peninsula. To prevent the enemy from 
encircling him on that side—for there was a considerable open 



Shall This Government Live or Die? 45 

space between the end of the breastwork and the shore—Pres¬ 
cott sent a force of Connecticut and New Hampshire men to oc¬ 
cupy the ground. They took position behind a stone and rail 
fence stuffed with hay. 

The British moved to the attack early in the afternoon with 
two thousand five hundred men under command of General 
Howe, who, with Burgoyne and Clinton, had joined Gage the 
previous month, and whose counsels had been productive of noth¬ 
ing in the meanwhile except a proclamation promising to hang 
John Hancock and Sam Adams. The main redoubt, the breast¬ 
work and the rail fence were assaulted simultaneously, Howe 
himself leading the attack on the fence. The British advanced 
slowly, firing as they came. The Americans, though bidden to 
reserve their fire, would have replied, but their officers struck 
their muskets from their hands. Warren himself carried a 
musket, for though out-ranking Prescott, he had refused to take 
command, having arrived at the scene of action after Prescott 
had made his dispositions. 

“Hold your fire until the word is given, and aim at the 
waist belt,” was the order that was repeated along the line, and 
“Old Put,” at the hay stuffed fence, emphasized it by promising 
to shoot the first man who pulled a trigger until the word came. 

When the word came, therefore, the Americans delivered a 
perfect rolling volley. At every point the British line was stopped 
and thrown back. Many companies that had contained thirty- 
nine men fell back from this fire with losses running as high as 
three-fourths of their number. 

Howe withdrew his men, reformed the line and again gave 
the order to advance. A second time the Americans waited, 
allowing the British to fire and load as they came, and when the 
line was within forty yards of the muzzles of the colonial guns 
a second volley rang out, repeating the execution of the first. 
No troops could stand such fire, delivered along the whole front 
of their line, at such range, and the British regulars again broke 
and retreated to the foot of the hill. 

Howe now shortened his line and made his third attack on 
the redoubt and breastwork alone. He also altered his tactics, 
and instructed his men to discard their knapsacks, press for¬ 
ward rapidly without firing and trust all to the bayonet. And 
now, as the British came on a third time, the American fire, 
which before had rolled out in ordered volleys, only sputtered. 
Prescott's powder had given out. Only by breaking cannon 
cartridges had he obtained a sufficient supply to repell the second 
assault. The men who had a round left discharged it, and then* 
clubbed their muskets, for the British, who had not broken in 
the face of the last ineffective fire, were now over the earth¬ 
work. The Americans, who were without bayonets, retired from 
the works; the British were content to occupy them, and did not 
follow. 


46 


What of America! 


‘‘A hundred and fifteen Americans lay dead across the 
threshhold of their country/' Among them was the gallant War¬ 
ren, a major general, fighting with a musket. A thousand and 
forty British were dead and wounded, of whom ninety-two were 
officers. Major Pitcairn, whose fate it was to give the order that 
opened the battle of Lexington, died here. 

Bunker Hill was the American answer to the language in 
the British parliament when coercion was being debated. The 
earl of Sandwich had said the Americans ran away at the siege 
of Louisburg, and asked what it signified if they could put two 
hundred thousand men in the field since they would melt at the 
first British volley. Rigby had said the Americans did not have 
among them the military prowess of a militia drummer. Bunker 
Hill was notice to the king's friends that the best equipped and 
disciplined troops of the empire could not drive the continentals 
while their powder lasted. 

Speaking militarily, the result of the Battle of Bunker Hill 
may best be described in the words of General Greene, who said 
the colonists always would be ready to sell the British another 
hill at the same price. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


47 


Britain, at an expense of 3 millions, has killed a 
hundred and fifty Yankees and gained a mile of ground. 
—Franklin’s comment on the Battle of Bunker Hill. 

XIV. 


The Colonies Adopt New England’s War As Their Own. 


HE second continental congress met in May, midway 
between Lexington and Bunker Hill, facing a pos¬ 
ture of affairs that might well have appalled an 
assembly possessing more regular powers than this 
one had. Its proceedings gave evidence that it 
had small understanding of the nature of the 
crisis that confronted the colonies. 

War had actually begun; blood had been shed; Boston was 
held by an invading force and was besieged by an army of seven¬ 
teen thousand militia. A battle threatened at any moment. In 
this situation the congress was wholly lacking in the unity and 
decision the emergency demanded. It was, indeed, without recog¬ 
nized authority and had no assurance*of backing from public 
opinion outside of Massachusetts. It proceeded, therefore, in a 
zigzag course that resulted in nothing but a series inconsistencies. 

It wasted time in debating a proposal to draw up a petition 
to the king, but at the same time refused to give back the king’s 
stronghold of Ticonderoga which had been captured by Ethan 
Allen and his Green Mountain militia. It urged New York against 
the provocative course of resisting the British if they attempted 
to land troops there, but thought the New Yorkers might be 
justified in using force if the enemy attempted to erect fortifi¬ 
cations. At the moment it was thus seeking to conciliate the king, 
it was sitting under the presidency of John Hancock, whom the 
king hated above all Americans, except perhaps Sam Adams, and 
who was at that moment a proscribed outlaw whom it was the 
duty of every loyal subject to seize on sight. And at the same 
time the congress was debating what soft words to use to the 
king, it was voting to organize a continental army and buy gun¬ 
powder to resist the king’s authority. 

Thus early were Americans given an exhibition of the futility 
of a government that lacked both power and responsibility. 
They were about to enter on a long war without any civil govern¬ 
ment except a factious council powerless, in law, to execute its 














48 


What of Am, erica? 


own decrees. Only by long and bitter experience were the colonies 
to discover that the source of their weakness, in war and in peace, 
was in this lack of a national authority. 

The condition of the army around Boston furnishes a good 
illustration of the results of this weakness. It was an army 
neither in organization, equipment nor discipline. Almost every 
company that appeared was on a different footing from every 
other. The contingents came with their own officers and under 
terms of enlistment of their own. It might be said there was no 
authority to prevent any man from going home when he wanted 
to. There were no uniforms and no stores. The army lived 
during the first months of the siege by a sort of miracle. George 
III, when informed of the facts, expressed an opinion not with¬ 
out weight from a military viewpoint. He said the larger the 
force the Americans assembled the better, for it must the sooner 
disperse in order to subsist. What the king overlooked, or had 
no information about, was the temper of the civilian population. 
If the army had no commissary the people had. Supplies came 
in from everywhere, donated by towns and individuals; and the 
soldiers not only had enough but frequently a surplus to sell. 

The army lay stretched out on a front of about nine miles, 
the wings at Dorchester and Malden and the center at Cambridge. 
The men lived as they could; some in tents, some in churches and 
public buildings, but mostly in huts contrived by themselves, of 
stone, timber or turf. There was hardly any discipline recog¬ 
nizable as military. The camp was perhaps more like a great 
fair than anything else. Farmers’ wagons would be arriving all 
day, and the distribution of packages of food and articles of 
clothing would make for noise and chaffering enough. A system 
of barter would come easily into effect, and John’s new shirt, 
fashioned for him by his mother, might find an owner in Abner., 
whose new powder horn John might fancy more. The mothers 
and sisters were themselves frequent visitors in the camp, and 
contrived by touches of their own to make the huts of the soldiers 
more homelike. 

Within the besieged city the British force, that had bought 
Bunker Hill at the colonists’ own price, was but a single remove 
from being a captive army. It was doubtful if it could hold 
Boston, once the Americans were prepared to attack, and it 
was certain it could not leave it except by water. In this cramped 
position General Burgoyne must have recalled with mortification 
the unfortunate boast he had made on landing a month before, to 
the effect that he would soon make elbow room. The Bostonians 
did not allow him to forget that remark. After his surrender at 
Saratoga two years later Burgoyne was brought to Boston a 
prisoner. As he was escorted through the crowded streets an 
old lady called out from a window: 

“Make way everybody, and give General Burgoyne elbow 
room!” 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 49 

For the ill assorted and unorganized host that held the 
British thus cooped up, congress had now to find a leader who 
could turn it into an army. It was not yet even a continental 
army, but only a New England one. Most of the troops were 
Massachusetts militia, the rest were from New Hampshire, Con¬ 
necticut and Rhode Island. The war, to this point, had been 
New England’s war. New England wanted it to be the war of 
the united colonies, and it was for this reason that when congress 
decided to take over New England’s army, John Adams was 
ready to make a gesture of generosity and nominate for com¬ 
mander-in-chief one who was not a New Englander. 

His suggestion was readily accepted, and June 15, the day 
before Colonel Prescott intrenched on Bunker Hill, congress chose 
for general of the continental army a Virginian of some military 
reputation in the French war, a delegate to congress from his 
state and chairman of its military committee, and a man of 
weight and increasing influence in all patriot councils. 

He was Colonel Washington of Mt. Vernon. 


50 


What of Ameeica? 


Until time shall be no more will a test of progress 
which our race has made in wisdom and virtue he de¬ 
rived from the veneration paid to the immortal name of 
Washington. —Lord Brougham. 

XV. 


The Virginia Upbringing of the Young Washington. 


EORGE WASHINGTON was now 43 years old, the 
first man of Virginia, not alone in military repu¬ 
tation, but in social position, wealth and political 
influence. He was of the flower of the colonial 
civilization of the South, physically, intellectually 
and in moral caliber. He stood 6 feet 3 inches in 
height, straight and slender; in manner somewhat 
aloof and with the nose of command. His mental attainments 
were solid rather than ornamental; high without being scholarly. 
The poise and balance of his makeup lay in character. A Vir¬ 
ginia country gentleman, landowner, slaveowner, legislator, 
colonel of militia. 

Virginian by birth, education and social upbringing, there 
were united in him an antecedent of good English blood and the 
strains of that of three generations of pioneers. Since 1657 the 
Washingtons had dwelt on the lands that lie between the Potomac 
and the Rappahannock; a planter family; well-to-do, foremost in 
colonial affairs and never without a colonel or a captain to give 
local prestige to the name. There, in Westmoreland County, on 
February 22, 1732, was born the most illustrious of the name, 
the son of Captain Augustine Washington and his second wife, 
Mary Ball Washington. 

The boy as he grew up lacked something of the advantages 
that had always belonged to the youth of the family, for his 
father died when George was 11 years old and the main family 
possessions went to an elder half-brother, Lawrence Wash¬ 
ington. Thereafter Mary Washington lived in somewhat reduced 
circumstances, and her son’s education as he grew to young man¬ 
hood was sacrificed in order that he might become a breadwinner. 
Of what may be called formal education he had none after he 
left the school of the Rev. James Mayre at Fredericksburg to be¬ 
come, at 15, a surveyor on the estate of Lord Fairfax. 















Shall This Goa^ernment Live or Die? 


51 


That is to say, George Washington, though he developed an 
easy and fluent writing style, never was a correct speller. But 
in the place of that accomplishment he had learned this rule, 
which we find in his copybook in his own hand: 

“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of 
Celestial fire called Conscience.’^ 

Perhaps that rule was more important after all than the 
one he broke when he spelled metropolis “matrapolis.” 

The date when the young surveyor went to work on the 
Fairfax estate is fixed for us in his diary: “Fryday, March 11, 
1747-8. Began my journey in company with George Fairfax, 
Esqr.; we travel’d this day 40 miles to Mr. George Newels in 
Prince William County.” 



MAJOR WASHINGTON, AT 22, JOURNEYING TO THE OHIO ON A DIPLOMATIC 

MISSION FROM THE GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA. 


He traveled through a wilderness, for the Fairfax lands 
“beyond the ridge” were virgin and almost limitless in extent. 
He slept in the forest or in the rude cabins of the settlers. He 
records: “I lay down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, 
fodder or bearskin * * * with man, wife and children, like a 
parcel of dogs and cats; and happy is he who gets the berth 
nearest the fire.” 

Again, appointed public surveyor at 20 with the rank of 
major in the provincial service, he sleeps “in one threadbare 
blanket with double its weight of vermin.” A hard life for a 
young Virginia gentleman who had a natural taste for the pleas¬ 
ure and refinements of Belvoir, the Fairfax seat, where were 
books and stately beds, a hospitable and plentiful table and the 























52 


What of America! 


company of the colony’s gentility; not forgetting the young 
ladies, to whom the youthful major was not lacking in attention 
when the opportunity offered. 

But no soldier training could have been better, and in these 
years the young Washington learned those habits of outdoor 
living and that fortitude under privation that were to make the 
man of Valley Forge. But these surveyor experiences were but 
the prelude to a more rigorous schooling in a life that was to 
make, not a soldier only, but a diplomat and statesman. He was 
only 22 when he was appointed by the governor on a mission 
that called for the qualities of all three. He was to go westward 
to the Ohio and try the effects of a friendly diplomacy on a 
mixed population of. free-living back-woodsmen, spying French 
and marauding Indians, who were stirring that far frontier to a 
dangerous activity. 

To go and return safely was in itself a feat as witness the 
facilities for crossing the ice-jammed rivers: “There was no way 
of getting over but on a raft; which we set about with but one 
poor hatchet.” And from that raft, when made. Major Washing¬ 
ton was hurled by the impact of an ice floe into ten feet of 
water. 

From this school he was graduated into a harder one, if 
calling for resources of a different kind; for now he was to 
taste military service with the king’s regular troops, and to find 
how the officers in that service regarded a mere provincial. 
A^ppointed lieutenant colonel of a Virginia regiment in the Grea\ 
Meadows campaign—for Washington’s report on the Ohio situa¬ 
tion that the French meant trouble was soon confirmed—he 
found his authority disputed and his presence resented by officers 
who took pains to show him that the select business of military 
command was the prerogative of a distinct class, and that class 
English. They put slights on the Virginian; his spirit flares up 
and we see him protesting indignantly to the governor, not only 
on his own behalf, but for his men. Perhaps there stirred in 
him at this time a feeling, not then to be identified, but which 
was none the less the protest of nationality. 

But now the revealing hour was at hand when all Virginia, 
the colonies and the English overseas were to hear the name of 
the young colonel. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


53 


In Washington's career mankind perceived some 
change in their ideas of greatness; the splendor of pow¬ 
er and even the name of conqueror had grown dim in 
their eyes. —Fisher Ames. 

XVI. 


The Exploit That Carried Washington’s Name Beyond the Sea. 

HE French and Indian Avar was now fully on and 
General Braddock was come with his redcoats to 
teach the enemy on the Ohio a lesson of England’s 
greatness. Braddock brought two veteran regi¬ 
ments, with artillery and all things complete for 
the biggest campaign the frontier had seen, and 
there was a great stir in Virginia when the king’s 
troops sailed up the Potomac and landed at Alexandria for their 
march to the wilderness. 

To Braddock it was to be but a small business. He told 
Franklin, who had done wonders in organizing a wagon train 
to transport the expedition’s supplies, that Ft. Duquesne would 
not detain him above three or four days. After that he was 
to march on and take Niagara and then Frontenac. To which 
Franklin replied after his manner that before taking Duquesne 
Braddock would have to get there. 

Washington joined the colors as colonel on Braddock’s 
staff, his purpose being, as he wrote: “To attain some knowl¬ 
edge of the military profession * * * under a gentleman of 

General Braddock’s abilities and experience.” Of those abilities, 
as we have seen. General Braddock had a pretty good opinion 
himself; too good to listen to the advice of a Virginia officer 
who never had held the king’s commission, and so paid no ab 
tention when Washington warned him that the formation and 
tactics of an army that had known only European warfare were 
unsuited to a forest battle field with Indians as adversaries. 
Braddock, brave, resolute, obstinate, sometimes laughed at this 
advice, sometimes was angry at it, and now and then grudgingly 
gave way on minor points. “The raw American militia,” he 
said might not know how to deal with the enemy, but it would, 
be a different story when British regulars dealt with them. 

Just across the Monongahela, with Ft. Duquesne still 
eight miles away, the disaster came. The British van, marching 
in ordered ranks along the narrow forest trail with never a 

















54 


What of America? 


skirmisher on front or flank, marched into the prepared trap. 
Two hundred French and six hundred Indians, hardly a marks¬ 
man of them visible in the thick forest growth, opened fire at 
once. The advance column was cut to pieces before the be¬ 
wildered and panic-stricken British could tell where to direct their 
fire. Braddock came up with the second division, and tried 
vainly to check the flight of the shattered van. Washington, 
riding in the thickest of the fight, implored the general to 
spread his men out into the woods. Braddock refused. He knew 
only one way to fight, and that was in platoon formation. Even 
when his men tried to take cover and meet the enemy with his 
own tactics, Braddock beat them back into line with his sword. 
There they were shot down without a chance for their lives until 
Braddock, seeing the futility of resistance, ordered a retreat. 
Then the regulars fled in the wildest rout. 

The remnant of the beaten British was.saved by the heroic 
efforts of Washington, who brought up and deployed his Indian 
fighters—“the raw American militia”—and protected its retreat. 
Two horses were shot under him; four bullets pierced his coat. 
He brought off what was left of Braddock’s army and then 
recorded what he thought of their conduct. Their “dastardly be¬ 
havior,” he wrote, in a flame of that indignation he never learned 
or tried to repress, “exposed those who were .inclined to do 
their duty to almost certain death.” This habit of setting down 
his exact meaning in exact words was to remain with him, as a 
future congress was to learn. 

Braddock himself was mortally wounded. Stretched in a 
wagon, he started back over that trail along which he had ad¬ 
vanced so confidently. We lose sight of his bodily wound in con¬ 
templation of that which his professional soldier mind had re¬ 
ceived. Amazement seems to have made him dumb. Twice only 
words escaped him as the jolting wagon bore him back, not to 
the settlements, but to death on the road. 

“Who would have thought it!” he exclaimed once, and then, 
after long silence, and just before he died, came that pathetic 
utterance that shows he had learned his lesson, if too late. 

“We shall know better how to deal with them next time.” 

Washington’s exploit brought him wide recognition, but the 
stupidity and bungling of the whole British military administra¬ 
tion in the war seems to have deprived him of any personal satis¬ 
faction in his own fame. He retired, depressed and ill, to Mount 
Vernon, and though he once more emerged when his health was 
recovered and took fresh command on the Ohio, it was to again 
meet the same obstacles of military prejudice, inefficiency, de¬ 
bate and delay that marked the king’s service throughout the 
war. 

But he was now without question Virginia’s foremost man, 
and in 1759, when he was 27 years old, he was elected to a seat 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


55 


in the house of burgesses. When he was welcomed to Williams¬ 
burg by the speaker of the house, Colonel Washington, always a 
little shy under public gaze, became embarrassed when he rose 
to reply and could not go on. Then came that gracious speech of 
Speaker Robinson, that was the voice of all Virginia. 

“Sit down, Mr. Washington, your modesty is equal to your 
valor, and that surpasses the power of any language that I 
possess.” 


56 


What of America? 


You are the only being for ivhom I have an awful 
reverence .—Lord Erskine to Washington. 

XVII. 


From Virginia Farmer to General of the Continental Army. 

UCH were the steps by which Washington had ad¬ 
vanced to the forefront in that Virginia society 
of the mid-eighteenth century. A mixed society 
of highland backwoodsmen and lowland aristocracy, 
and though he belonged to the latter, the leadership 
he exercised extended over both. Between the close 
of the French wars and the coming of those events 
that stirred the colonies to resistance against the crown he led the 
quiet life of a Virginia farmer at Mt. Vernon. 

He had now attained to full manhood, and was in every 
way the finest expression of manhood that age had given. “His 
person, you know,” Jefferson has written, “was fine, his stature 
exactly what one could wish, his deportment easy, erect and 
noble.” Gilbert Stuart, the painter, records that he never saw 
a man with such large eye-sockets, or with such breadth of 
nose between the eyes. His hair was light brown, the eyes 
grayish-blue. His mouth was habitually compressed, his fore¬ 
head wide and high. He was what we call a handsome man, and 
one whom people turned to look at. He was attentive to his 
dress, and whether dancing or on horseback was a perfect figure 
for grace. Mrs. Adams, on first sight of him, wrote to her hus¬ 
band: “I was struck with General Washington. You had pre¬ 
pared me, but I thought the half was not told me. Dignity, with 
ease and complacency, the gentleman and the soldier, look agree¬ 
ably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of 
his face.” 

If we can imagine that figure in the blue and buff uniform 
of a Virginia colonel, riding with tasseled sword, the Wash¬ 
ington arms glistening on his horse trappings, we shall not won¬ 
der at the impression he made one May morning in 1758 when, 
on his way to Williamsburg, he stopped at an hospitable Vir¬ 
ginia mansion for the night. And an impression he did make on 
one member of that household, who may have been looking from 
the window as he rode up. At any rate when Colonel Washing¬ 
ton bowed low before Martha Dandridge, the charming 26-year- 
old widow of Daniel Parke Custis, Virginia’s most notable love 















Shall This Government Live or DieI 57 

affair that instant began. It was not the first time Washington 
had been in love. So long ago as when he was surveying “beyond 
the ridge” we find him writing to an intimate of his “lowland 
beauty,” sometimes identified as Lucy Grymes, who married 
Henry Lee. Her son Harry became an officer under Wash¬ 
ington, and her grandson led the army that surrendered to Grant 
at Appomattox. Also there are letters in Washington’s early 
hand to “Dear Sally,” and when he was 20 he was writing to 
William Fauntleroy asking permission to call upon his sister 
Betsy, who appears from this letter to have once discouraged his 
attentions. In 1756, when Washington went to Boston upon an 
errand of military import to Governor Shirley, he stopped in 
New York, and at the house of Beverley Robinson, where he was 
entertained, met Mary Philipse, “a beauty and an heiress,” and 
Washington lingered there many days beyond the time he had 
appointed to leave. 

But what with surveying, fighting, and attending to his 
legislative duties, Washington until now had never paid anything 
but fitful court to any lady. But when he rode away from the 
“White House,” the Custis mansion, on that May morning, he 
had arranged to stop there again on his way back from Williams¬ 
burg. At that second stopping all was done—so ardent, swift and 
successful was the colonel’s courting. In January, 1759, Martha 
Custis became Martha Washington. Her fortune added to his 
own made Washington the most substantial man in Virginia, and 
perhaps in the colonies. 

And now was to follow an interlude of some sixteen years 
during which Washington was to live at Mt. Vernon the life 
he most loved. Cultivating his broad acres, developing the best 
stable in all Virginia, hunting in “blue coat, scarlet waistcoat, 
buckskin breeches and velvet cap,” presiding at an hospitable 
table, experimenting with new crops, attending conscientiously to 
public affairs, he was the type of country proprietor to which 
Virginia owed her rapid development in that lull between two 
storms. It was the happiest period of his life; this, and the 
brief space left to him after he retired from the presidency, were 
the only times in his crowded years when he could indulge his 
own tastes. His letters and his diary show how absorbed he was 
in every detail of the management of his great estate. He at¬ 
tended personally to the planting, the timber cutting, the harvest¬ 
ing and shipping of his crops—the Mt. Vernon mark on every¬ 
thing he marketed fixed Virginia’s standard for excellence—and 
no slave on his plantation could, shirk an hour’s work and hope 
to have it passed unobserved. Nor could slave or other humble 
person on Mt. Vernon’s acres want for anything in sickness or 
misfortune that the careful and watchful master failed to supply. 

When the interlude was over and the call to public duty 
came Washington was ready, but full of regret for the scenes 


58 


What of America? 


he was leaving behind. Henceforth to the end of his life the eyes 
of the world were upon him, and it was a gaze he never learned 
to bear without distaste. ' As a member of the continental 
congress he withdrew from the room when Adams proposed his 
name as commander-in-chief. Brought back, he accepted the com¬ 
mission in a few short sentences, very like the man in their 
modesty and directness. He refused in advance to have any pay 
attached to his commission. 

When Howe evacuated Boston and the American army 
marched in, congress presented a gold medal to the general, which 
the British historian Trevelyan pointedly remarked was the only 
coin Washington ever received for his inestimable service to his 
country. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


59 


We hold these institutions to he transmitted as well 
as enjoyed .—Daniel Webster. 

XVIII. 


The Declaration of Independence. 


HEN Washington went to Cambridge in July, 1775, 
and took command of, the army a state of affairs 
existed probably unparalleled in the history of war 
and government. 

There was no United States, and legally no 
government at all of a central character. The 
colonies were at war with the king, but still ac¬ 
knowledged his authority, at least they had not formally thrown 
it off. There was a congress at Philadelphia, but, as John Adams 
said of it, it was ‘‘not a legislative assembly, nor a representa¬ 
tive assembly, but only a diplomatic assembly.’^ 

It was, in fact, nothing but a voluntary gathering of colonial 
notables—some of them not particularly notable—come together 
to confer on a common danger. They had no legal standing as a 
government, no mandate from the colonies, no power to legislate 
or execute. 

The most they could do was to recommend common measures 
to their provinces, but these were binding on none. As the old 
charter constitutions were now gone and nothing had taken their 
place—not until the next year did the states begin to adopt consti¬ 
tutions—the word that most exactly describes the colonial society 
over which congress presided is anarchy. John Adams relates an 
incident that well illustrates this deplorable condition. He met 
an old client of his, a horse trader of litigious disposition fre¬ 
quently on the wrong side of the law, and who now hailed Adams 
with a joyful countenance and warm congratulations. 

“You have done great things for us, Mr. Adams!’' he cried. 
“There are no courts now, and I hope there never will be 
again.” 

Adams becomes reflective at this. “Is this,” he sets down 
in his diary, “the object for which I have been contending? Are 
these the sentiments of such people?” 

The idea of independence had not yet taken hold on the 
people, and the idea of a central government was still more 
distant from their minds. Until independence was declared there 
could be no united action and certainly no help from abroad 















f)() What o f America? 

But congress hung back. In the preceding year the first conti¬ 
nental congress had told the king that the report the colonies 
wanted independence was a calumny. Washington himself had 
supported that address. Franklin had told Lord Chatham that, 
in the course of his extensive travels in the colonies, he never 
had heard an expression from any person, whether drunk or 
sober, to the effect that independence was desirable. The second 
congress feared public opinion on that subject, and so tempor¬ 
ized. Of this situation Charles Lee wrote: ‘The pulse of 
congress is low. There is a poorness of spirit, and a langor, in 
the late proceedings * * * that I confess frightens me so 
much that at times I regret having embarked. * * 



SIGNIJ>IG THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS, 

PHILADELPHIA, JULY 4, 1776. 


The same uncertainty hung over many, dividing society, 
dividing families. John Dickinson, though not an extremist, had 
to hear from his mother the constant prediction, “Johnny, you 
will be hanged.’" 

Congress worked busily with both hands, but not letting its 
right know what its left was doing. With one it dispatched its 
petition to the king and with the other created a secret com¬ 
mission to buy powder, field pieces and muskets. Washington 
proceeded with his organization of the army and with his plans 
to assault Howe or drive him by tactical means, to withdraw his 
forces from Boston. So successful were these latter that with no 



























































































































































































Shall. This Government Live or Die? 


61 


more urging than a bombardment of limited duration—for 
Washington had small store of ordnance—the British general 
embarked his force and sailed away in March, 1776. 

Thus the compulsion of events was stronger than all parties. 
In an anomalous situation one thing at least was real—a state of 
war existed; armies and fleets were marching and sailing to 
compass the colonies about; they had raised an army to defend 
themselves; battles had been fought and the military situation 
was such, at the moment, as to give high hopes. But the time 
must come when the people would have to be agreed as to what 
they were fighting for; and so, at last, under the leadership of 
Washington’s own state, the patriot party in congress was invited 
to adopt the Virginia resolutions declaring that the colonies ought 
to be free and independent. 

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Robert 
Livingston and Roger Sherman were appointed a committee 
to draw up a declaration to that effect, but for the moment the 
Virginia resolutions were accepted only in principle. For one 
thing time was wanted to hear what the people of the provinces 
thought about them. But in the meantime the committee went 
ahead with its work; Jefferson was selected to write the docu¬ 
ment and he produced it, it is said, without consulting a single 
reference. Probably it had been in his head for some time. The 
sentiments and even the language it contained had been the 
common currency of thought and speech among the patriot lead¬ 
ers ever since Lexington. 

The committee approved Jefferson’s work with scarcely 
a change, and it was presented to congress on June 28, 1776. 
That body had not then adopted the Virginia resolutions, but it 
now did so, and followed this action on July 4, with the 
adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The interval was 
taken up with a revision of Jefferson’s text, a process which 
Franklin tells us the Virginian did not much relish. To console the 
author Franklin told him the story of John Thompson’s sign. John 
set up a hatter’s shop in Philadelphia and his first care was to 
compose an effective sign. After much thought he produced one 
that read: "‘John Thompson, hatter, makes and sells hats for 
ready money.” This he submitted to his friends for their approval. 
The first objected that the word “hatter” was unnecessary as 
being repetitious. It was struck out. The next critic advised 
that the word “makes” be omitted, as John’s customers would 
not care who made the hats if they were good. This advice was 
followed. The third adviser could see no reason to include the 
words “for ready money,” pointing out that all business trans¬ 
actions in Philadelphia were for cash anyway. They were struck 
out. “Why sells?” asked the last friend to be consulted; “your 
customers will not expect you to give your hats away.” The 
word was dispensed with, and the completed sign stood: “John 
Thompson, Hats.” 


62 


What of America? 


The changes in the Declaration of Independence were not 
great, however. Jefferson had included in his indictment against 
the king a strong count against his support of the slave trade. 
Some southern members objected to this and it was stricken out. 
So also the charge that the king had withdrawn the royal gov¬ 
ernors, thus leaving the colonies without the protection of law. 
Congress, which was appealing to a candid world, thought this 
was not an accurate statement of the facts, the governors having 
fled for their lives, and one, a little tardy in getting away, being 
at that moment in jail. One paragraph too, that included the 
British people in the indictment against the king, was softened 
somewhat. 

The Declaration was then adopted and signed, John Han¬ 
cock making his signature as conspicuous *‘as though it were 
written between Orion and Pleiades,’' and Franklin grimly in¬ 
formed congress of what it had done by saying pithily: 

“Now we must hang together or we shall hang separately.” 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 63 

To place any dependence upon militia is assuredly 
resting upon a broken staff. —Washington. 

XIX. 

Military Weakness of the Colonies and Its Cause. 

HE colonies were now embarked upon the Revolution, 
but the word itself is a little misleading. It was 
not, for example, the kind of revolution Adams's 
horse trader wanted. It was a political revolution 
only, by which the form of government, but not 
that of society or law, was changed. It necessi¬ 
tated a war, but if we think of that war as one for 
the independent national existence of the American colonies we 
shall have a clearer understanding of its character. 

That it retained that character was owing to the advanced 
state of the political education of the leaders who conducted it. 
They were not theorists or speculators. The people they led were 
not a mob rising against social oppression. Even their political 
oppression was perhaps not clearly apparent to the common view 
of the times. Lord Mansfield told the British parliament that 
the Americans were not more oppressed politically than were 
the people of Manchester, and in a legal sense he was right; 
neither were represented in parliament. 

The Americans, when they resisted the king, were asserting 
no new rights such as 'The rights of man" about which the 
French political speculators taught their followers to talk. The 
Americans had a background of a hundred and fifty years of 
orderly constitutional government, and fought to keep institu¬ 
tions as old as the English kingship. Their leaders were neither 
political philosophers nor demagogues such as, in turn, led the 
French people in revolt, but were solid, practical, experienced men 
of public affairs. People and leaders fought to assert and pre¬ 
serve principles of English law and government that had been 
violated by a king—a king, the English historian Lecky declares, 
who had committed acts as unconstitutional as any that had led 
Charles I to the scaffold. 

These are the reasons the American Revolution, considered 
as such, was the mildest in history, if we except the English revo¬ 
lution of 1689, which was accomplished by only a show of force. 
No law and no institution was subverted; society suffered no 
wrench; the objective was attained, and no other was sought, 
when the government of the colonies was transferred from West¬ 
minster to Philadelphia. 

But there was one lesson in government the Americans had 
not yet learned when the war began. Their experience with the 
crown had made them afraid of two things—executive authority 
and standing armies. Their institutions worked best, they be¬ 
lieved, when locally administered. Self government, as inter- 














64 


AY H A T OF America! 


preted by the colonies, meant the government of each colony by 
itself and for itself. The United States of America referred to 
in the Declaration of Independence were thirteen independent 
and sovereign states united only for the purpose of defense, and 
that only loosely. They would not hear of a standing army and 
each colony relied on its militia. They were not a nation, and 
they were without a common executive government; and until 
the last year of the war they continued their common defense 
without one. If they had a central government at all up to the 
time the Articles of Confederation went into effect in 1781 
it was Washington and his army rather than the Continental 
congress. 

As a result of this weakness the congressional support of 
the war was a failure from the first. Congress could raise no 
revenue of its own authority and enlist no force not voluntarily 
furnished by the states. The Continental army, as organized in 
1775, consisted of ten companies of riflemen raised in Virginia, 
Maryland and Pennsylvania. New England already was in arms. 
The most congress could do was to recommend “to the inhabit¬ 
ants of the United English colonies” that they form companies 
of militia for incorporation into this force. Commissions were 
scattered broadcast; anybody who could raise a company of 
fifty-nine men could be a captain, and anybody who could raise 
fifty-nine hundred could be a colonel. Enlistments were for short 
periods. When Washington took command at Boston he found 
the terms of service of every unit in his force would expire within 
six months. This defect of the military system, which was a 
direct result of the defect of the civil power, was chiefly re¬ 
sponsible for the prolongation of the war and for many of its 
military disasters. Throughout 1775 congress steadily refused 
to extend any terms of enlistment beyond 1776. 

As a result of this policy, against which Washington pro¬ 
tested from the first, the armies melted almost as fast as organ¬ 
ized. Washington's battles were fought for the most part with 
a small nucleus of Continental troops and with such re-enforce- 
ments of militia as he could gather on short notice from the im¬ 
mediate vicinity. The militia was opposed to serving outside the 
state in which it was raised, and usually disbanded and went 
home the moment its service had expired. Arnold's expedition 
against Quebec furnishes a good example of the working of the 
short enlistment plan. His small force of eleven hundred men, 
which had dwindled to 750 by the time the objective was 
reached, was ready to attack only on the last day of legal service 
for a large portion of the troops who were to make the assault. 

A rapid review of the main military events of the Revolu¬ 
tion will now disclose how these weaknesses of the civil power, 
carried into the military administration, repeatedly jeopardized 
the cause of the colonies and snatched from Washington the early 
victory he might otherwise have achieved. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


65 


Undismayed by disaster, unchanged by changing 
fortune. —Henry Lee on Washington. 

In the possession of that mysterious quality of 
character, forming a standard to which the merit of 
other men is referred, and a living proof that pure 
patriotism is not a delusion, nor virtue an empty name, 
no one of the sons of men has equaled George Wash¬ 
ington. —Edward Everett. 


XX. 


Washington Saves the Revolution in the Jersey Campaign. 

HEN, in January, 1776, it was proposed to make an 
attack on Boston, it was necessary to call out a 
force of militia to aid in the enterprise; and con¬ 
gress, with its usual shortsighted policy fixed the 
term of service of these recruits at only three 
months. Writing to congress at the time of this 
concentration at Dorchester Heights, Washington 
urged the necessity of a permanent and disciplined force, and 
declared: 

'‘To expect the same service from raw and undisciplined 
recruits as from veteran soldiers is to expect what never did and 
perhaps never will happen.” 

But whether by unwise neglect or unwise interference con¬ 
gress never failed to show its complete misconception of a military 
policy. Thus, after Washington, by his skillful dispositions, had 
forced Howe's evacuation of Boston, without the necessity of an 
attack, the American general hurried with his force to New 
York; but congress, taking no account of the impending battles 
there, detached ten regiments from his small army to reinforce 
the ill-fated Canadian expedition. As a result Washington had 
no more than 5,300 Continentals and some hastily gathered militia 
with which to dispute the possession of Long Island with twenty 
thousand British regulars. 

He was defeated, saved his army, retreated first to New 
York and thence to Harlem, and again addressed congress in 
passionate protest against its course. 

“I am pursuaded,” he wrote, “that our liberties must of 
necessity be greatly hazarded, if not entirely lost, if their defense 
be left to any but a permanent standing army; I mean one to 
exist during the war.” 















66 


AV H A T OF America? 


He had the courage to go against the most deep seated 
colonial prejudice, the very essence of which was in congress, 
when he further declared: 

“The jealousy of a standing army and the evils to be ap¬ 
prehended from one, are remote, but the consequence of wanting 
one is certain and inevitable ruin. For if I was called upon to 
declare upon oath whether the militia had been most serviceable 
or hurtful, upon the whole I should subscribe to the latter."’ 

Washington with his reduced and demoralized army retreated 
across New Jersey, hotly pressed. Congress fled from its capital; 
panic seized the population; the cause seemed lost. In that dark 



WASHINGTON RECEIVING THE SURRENDER OF THE HESSIAN FORCE AFTER HIS 

SURPRISE ATTACK AT TRENTON. 


hour Washington executed his brilliant coup at Trenton. Crossing 
the Delaware on Christmas night with a picked force whose pass 
word was “Victory or Death,” he marched nine miles through a 
bitter storm and over snow “tinged here and there with blood 
from the feet of the men who wore broken shoes.” The men 
carried their muskets under their coats to protect the locks from 
the wet. So exhausted were they by the forced march that 
when, before dawn, a halt was made to refresh the men with 
food before the attack, many of ttie soldiers fell asleep in the 
snow. But complete success crowned the heroic effort. The 
Hessian force at Trenton was defeated, routed and captured. A 
thousand enemies fell into Washington’s hands. 

































Shall This Government Live or Die? 


67 


It is with these same Hessians that Elizabeth, N. J., as¬ 
sociates the story of its patriotic minister, the Rev. James Cald¬ 
well. In a Hessian raid on the town its defenders ran out of 
paper wadding for their guns. The minister ran to his church, 
gathered up all the hymn books, arid tearing out the leaves dis¬ 
tributed them among the soldiers, crying: 

/‘Give them Watts, boys, give them Watts!’" 

Nor was the victory of Trenton the sole result of the dash 
and daring of that unparalleled dead of winter campaign. Corn¬ 
wallis, at Princeton, marched out with part of his force on the 
news from Trenton, confident that Washington had delivered 
himself into his hands. 

“At last,” he exultingly told his officers, “we have run down 
the old fox and we’ll bag him in the morning.” 

But eluding Cornwallis, Washington counter marched almost 
over the trail of the British general, struck swiftly at the force 
that had been left at Princeton, routed it, and before the be¬ 
wildered British had recovered from these successive blows had 
successfully withdrawn to Morristown and quartered his army for 
the winter. 

We have the testimony of Cornwallis himself as to the 
quality of generalship Washington displayed in these remarkable 
movements. Five years later when the British general laid down 
his arms he expressed amazement at the skill with which Wash¬ 
ington had conducted the Yorktown campaign. 

“But after all,” he added, “your excellency’s achievements in 
New Jersey were such that nothing could surpass them.” 

Washington’s Continentals numbered less than three thou¬ 
sand when he quartered them at Morristown, and summer had 
come before the tardy efforts of congress had increased them to 
seven thousand; and with this slender force Washington turned 
south in July to oppose Howe, who had left New York and trans¬ 
ported his army by sea to the Chesapeake. The armies met at 
the Brandywine; the Americans were worsted and fell back, and 
Howe’s road to Philadelphia was open. In September he oc¬ 
cupied the city. 

Franklin, when told in Paris that Howe had taken Philadel¬ 
phia, shrewdly retorted: “Philadelphia has taken Howe.” 

A fight at Germantown, where Washington had attempted 
to rout the British camp and in which he was beaten off, ended 
the major operations of the year 1777. The British feasted and 
danced at Philadelphia through the winter and Washington and 
his ragged Continentals starved and froze twenty miles away at 
Valley Forge. 


68 


What of AmerigaI 


If you speak of eloquence, Mr, Rutledge of South 
Carolina is by far the greatest orator; hut if you speak 
of solid information and sound judgment, Colonel Wash¬ 
ington is unquestionably the greatest man on the floor .— 
Patrick Henry on the First Continental Congress. 

A character of virtues, so happily tempered by one 
another and so wholly unalloyed by any vices, as that of 
Washington, is hardly to be found on the pages of his¬ 
tory. —Charles James Fox. 

XXL 


Congress Neglects Army for Politics. 



HE black winter of Valley Forge perhaps marked 
the lowest ebb of America’s declining fortunes. 
The incapacity of congress had left the army 
destitute. Congress, in its jealousy, had enacted 
that the purchasing and other subordinate agen¬ 
cies in the commissary and quartermaster de¬ 
partments should report directly to the house 
over the heads of their chiefs. This order demoralized those 
departments, drove out the competent chiefs, who refused to 
take responsibility under such loose methods, and resulted 
in the complete breakdown of the transport and supply. While 
Washington’s soldiers were starving and going in rags, civilian 
congressmen were squabbling over reports they did not under¬ 
stand, and rations, and clothing stood abandoned on the roads. 

In December Washington reported that there was not a 
single hoof of any kind to slaughter, and not more than 
twenty-five barrels of flour in his camp. Soaked wheat and 
sugar, and a soup thickened with bread became a diet, but 
“fire-cake” was the principal article of food—a kind of 
dough baked in embers. Hear this outburst of a pious chap¬ 
lain: “Fire-cake and water for breakfast! Fire-cake and water 
for dinner! Fire-cake and water for supper! May the Lord 
send that our commissary for purchases may live on fire-cake 
and water!” An officer, inquiring what the men were cook¬ 
ing in a kettle, was told: “A stone, colonel. They say there is 
some strength in stones if you can get it out.” 

Even before the army went into camp three thousand 
were returned in inspection reports as unfit for duty, “by 
reason of their being barefoot and otherwise naked,” and as 
the winter wore on this condition increased. Washington’s 
orderly book yields this entry: “The commander-in-chief 








Shall This Government Live or Die? 69 

offers a reward of $10 to any person who shall, by 9 o’clock 
on Monday morning, produce the best substitute for shoes, 
made of raw hides.” 

The men sat up all night around fires; to lie down with¬ 
out blankets was to freeze. “The whole army,” reported 
General Wayne, “is sick and crawling with vermin.” In their 
weakened state men returned as effectives were scarcely 
strong enough to mount guard. Their feet, bound with strips 
of blankets, left blood stains on the frozen ridges of mud and 
snow. Even in this condition they were better off than those 
in the hospital, so called, where the sick were stretched on the 
bare ground without covering. 



THE BLACK WINTER OF VALLEY FORGE. WASHINGTON AND LAFAYETTE IN- 
SPECTING THE CAMP WHERE THE NEGLECT OF CONGRESS HAD LEFT THE 
PATRIOT ARMY TO FREEZE AND STARVE. 

While the army thus suffered and Washington was re¬ 
porting that “unless some great and capital change” should 
take place in the management of supply the entire force would 
be wiped out, the congressional exiles from Philadelphia were 
clamoring for him to recapture that city so they could go back 
and be in comfort. Washington replied to these importunities, 
sometimes with patience, sometimes with sternness and some¬ 
times with disdain. He was now well aware that a cabal 
existed in congress that sought his overthrow. These detrac¬ 
tors were busy undermining his reputation, misrepresenting his 
























70 


AVhat of Ameeica? 


motives, belittling his achievements. Even the love and loyalty 
his officers and men had for him was turned to the account 
of the conspirators, and was called “idolatry” and “adulation” 
for which the country would have to pay. Greene, Knox, Ham¬ 
ilton, Sullivan—all those generals nearest to Washington— 
were denounced by this clique in congress as sycophants, brag¬ 
garts, madmen, drunkards. 

Gates’s victory in the north where Burgoyne had been 
forced, through Washington’s own dispositions, to surrender 
in the preceding October, had given the cabal the handle it 
wanted; and the same congress that in panic during the Jersey 
retreat had given Washington dictatorial powers to raise 
troops to save Philadelphia, now intrigued to put the victor 
of Saratoga in command. 

But we must have no misconceptions about the weight or 
influence of congress. It was not now, if it ever had been, a 
representative body. Many of its members, and by far the 
ablest, were absent from its deliberations. Some were on 
diplomatic missions abroad, some were at home hastening 
recruiting or administering government in their states and 
some were more taken up with the battles of politics than with 
those of the armies. The sessions of congress at this time 
therefore frequently were attended by no more than eight or 
ten members. Too few to attend to public business, they were 
enough to neglect it, or to undo what wiser heads had done. 

It was in the darkest hour of this dark winter that Wash¬ 
ington wrote out his resignation as commander-in-chief. If 
congress would not feed his army perhaps it would feed it if 
commanded by another. And here comes in the story of the 
penknife his mother had given him when he was a boy. In 
those days he had wanted to join the navy, but her wishes were 
against it. An appointment had been obtained for him, and 
he was on the eve of his departure to join his ship when her 
protestations‘prevailed. He gave up his cherished plan, and, 
gratified by his submission to her authority she gave him the 
penknife with the admonition, “Always obey your superiors.” 

Washington always carried the knife and had often re¬ 
lated to his generals the circumstances under which he came 
to possess it. When his generals sat in council in this hour, 
silent, grief stricken, with the resignation before them, General 
Knox asked: 

“How about your penknife. General?” 

“What has that to do with it?” asked Washington. 

“You were always to obey your superiors. You were 
ordered to command this army. You have not been ordered 
to lay that command down.” 

“You are right,” said Washington, and tore the resigna¬ 
tion up. 


Shall. This Government Live or Die? 


71 


If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are 
dead, either write things worth reading or do things 
worth the writing. —Benjamin Franklin. 

XXII. 


Franklin’s Shoestring of Diplomacy and What He Made of It. 


HE year that followed the Valley Forge winter pro¬ 
duced little in military results, but it witnessed 
the treaty of alliance with France. In February, 
1778, while Washington’s tattered soldiers 
hugged the fires on their bleak hillside, Benjamin 
Franklin at Paris affixed his signature to the 
document that proclaims him the greatest and 
most successful diplomatist in history. 

ree max keep a secrei. iF iwo of 4:fiem are dead 

~ Rjor Ricfiarcl 

Less than two years before Franklin had appeared at 
Paris as commissioner from congress, and though as a philos¬ 
opher and scientist whose reputation extended over all Europe 
he was received by all classes, official France durst not recog¬ 
nize him openly. Franklin had spent fifteen years in London, 
previous to the revolution, as agent for Pennsylvania and other 
colonies, and was known and regarded abroad not only as the 
greatest of Americans but as among the greatest of men. His 
story was known in every country; how as a boy he had 
started out to make his fortune with nothing but a loaf of 
bread under his arm; how he had taught himself out of books 
and from observation of Nature all that the wisest men had 
learned at universities; how, by industry and the persevering 
development of his extraordinary mind he had raised himself 
from printer’s devil to the highest pinnacles of literary, philo¬ 
sophic and scientific fame. Europe warmed itself at Franklin 
stoves; Franklin lightning rods protected its capitals from a 
heavenly wrath they had too good reason to fear; his maxims 
of wisdom had been translated into every language; his scien¬ 
tific discoveries were discussed in every academy. 

[Ilf you fiave no fioney in your pot fiave in 

XOixr morrtfi 




— Poor' lRiclnar<l 

















72 


What of 


America 1 


Now, when he was 70 years old and had won in many 
fields a renown as great as that enjoyed by the most renowned 
in each, he had crossed the ocean again at the risk of cap¬ 
ture to meet in the field of diplomacy the most skilled votaries 
of that distinctly European art. All Paris crowded to see him. 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, WHOSE SHOESTRING OF DIPLOMACY WAS A SHIPLOAD OF 
INDIGO WHICH HE TRADED FOR THE FRENCH TREATY OF ALLIANCE. 

The great Dr. Franklin was more in demand than a king's 
minister. His portrait was in the shop windows; his sayings 
were handed about in society; the fashionable wore their 
clothes a la Franklin. The highest in the government re¬ 
ceived him privately, but as France was at peace with Eng- 



Shall This Government Live or Die? 


73 


land the ministers were careful not to give offense. .Franklin 
himself was equally decorous, but the English ambassador 
was not deceived. He warned the French government not to 
be hoodwinked by the doctor’s innocent appearance. 

“Dr. Franklin,” said Lord Stormont, “has got the better 
of three English foreign ministers, and is never so dangerous 
as when he appears the most simple.” 

This was the gentleman whose name Franklin made fa¬ 
mous in Paris by his retort, when asked if a certain statement 
Lord Stormont had made were true. 

“No,” replied Franklin, “it is not true, it’s a—Stormont.” 



_otiTice of wii -tfiaf ij* Lou^fii ix wortfi 

a pou-ixcl -tfia-t ix iaugfl-t 

— Poor RicfiardL 


Franklin worked quietly and unobtrusively. He even 
withdrew from the city a short distance to Plassy, where his 
house became the rendezvous for all the notables of France. 
Even this popularity, the manifestations of which frequently 
were distasteful to him—as when he had to sit and hear laud¬ 
atory verses recited in his honor at social functions—was 
skillfully capitalized by him. He contrived by these means 
to make the American cause fashionable in Paris, and in Paris 
that meant a great deal. One by one the ministers were won 
over, not to open recognition of the United States at first, for 
that would mean war with England, but to Franklin’s pro- 
posals for secret credits. This point gained, he fell to bor¬ 
rowing, and first to last he borrowed twenty-six million francs 
from the French and spent it with them for supplies for Wash¬ 
ington’s army. 

(Ilfi e wi^'e man draw-r more advan'ta^e from 
enemiej' ifian ifie fool from fiij' friend[»r 

—Poor PicHard 

At last came the news of Burgoyne’s surrender, and the 
French government threw off the mask. Franklin was re¬ 
ceived openly by ministers and king, and the treaty of alliance 
was made. It was Franklin’s hour of triumph. He had to come 
to France on a ship that carried a cargo of indigo, which was 
sold when he reached port to pay the expenses of his mis¬ 
sion. On that shoe-string of diplomacy he had, by his en¬ 
ergy, his patience and the compelling force of his own person¬ 
ality, achieved a result that would have been pronounced im¬ 
possible by every statesman in Europe. He had not only 
raised up a friend for America, but an enemy for England. 


74 


What of America f 


He ■ffiai j'cai'tenr ifiorni5\le4 Rim tio‘£ go barefoo'i 

“ Poor RicHardl 

Poor Louis had his misgivings of this business. He, too, 
was in the king trade, and while willing to deal a blow at 
England and a'brother king, had his royal doubts about the 
wisdom of encouraging rebels. Fortunate would it have been 
for Louis if his own rebels, when the time came for him to 
have them, had been, like George’s, on the other side of an 
ocean. 











Shall This Government Live or Die? 


75 


On the day that Franklin Avent to King Louis’s court, in 
his simple dress, spectacles and unpowdered hair, walking 
through lines of the applauding, bewigged and lace-ruffled 
nobility of France, the United States took its recognized place 
among the family of nations. It had gained admittance there, 
not solely through its demonstrated ability to maintain its own 
independence, for the issue of the war was still in doubt, but 
through the adroit and untiring labors of his country’s fifst 
and greatest contribution to universal genius. Dr. Bonhomme 
Richard Franklin. 


76 


What of America? 


You can form no idea of the perplexity of my situa¬ 
tion. No man, I believe, ever had a greater choice of 
difficulties, and less means to extracite himself from 
them. —Washington to his brother, written during the 
Jersey campaign. 


XXIII. 


Clinton Gets Away and the War Shifts to the South. 

ASHINGTON’S army, augmented to about 15,000 
men by the spring of 1778, was still too weak to 
attempt an attack on Philadelphia and its com¬ 
mander wisely waited until the news of the com¬ 
ing of the French fleet under d’Estaing warned 
the British that it was time to be gone. Clinton, 
who had succeeded Howe, abandoned the capital 
in June, withdrawing toward New York, and Washington, 
who had disposed his forces for that contingency, took up a 
parallel march prepared to strike the retreating enemy on his 
flank. 

The attack was planned to be made at Monmouth court 
house, and Charles Lee was assigned to command the van and 
engage the enemy at that point. Lee was opposed to the en¬ 
terprise and had spoken against it in council. When over¬ 
ruled he had at first declined to command the advance, and 
then when it had been given to Lafayette had begged it back. 
Lee, a soldier of fortune, had no heart in the American cause 
and no convictions of any kind. If his sympathies were any¬ 
where they were with the British. The reasons for his conduct 
at Monmouth never have been made entirely clear, but what 
is clear is that he displayed no zeal, disobeyed his orders and 
so far from maintaining an offensive put his men upon the 
retreat the moment the enemy showed resistance. Only the 
arrival of Washington with the main force saved the day from 
being a disaster. As it was the chance of delivering a decisive 
blow had! been lost, and after desperate fighting Clinton man¬ 
aged to draw off his army and reach New York. 

Much has been written about what Washington said to 
Lee when they met on the battlefield. Not many heard the 
encounter, but many saw it, and Washington's appearance prob¬ 
ably has been accurately described as that of ‘‘an avenging 
diety." Whatever else Lee had done or failed to do, he had 












Shall This Government Live or Die? 77 

given orders he could not now explain to the white hot Wash¬ 
ington; and whatever else he heard himself called by that 
usually cool and reserved commander and one time copyist of 
the ''Rules of Civility/' he unquestionably heard himself called 
a "damned poltroon," which probably was sufficient to apprise 
him of the degree of esteem in which his superior held him. 

All that it seems necessary to say further about Charles 
Lee is that he was not of that Virginia family that produced 
Light Horse Harry, Richard Henry and Robert E. Lee. Charles 
Lee was of an English family, and before he came to America 
had fought in the Polish wars and in Portugal. He fought 
only for gain and distinction, and his career up to its final 
ruin at Monmouth had been distinguished only by vanity, jeal¬ 
ousy and insubordination. A court-martial retired him to pri¬ 
vate life, where he soon died obscurely. 

While Washington watched Clinton in New York, the war 
shifted to the south, where the British, by successful actions 
at Savannah and Augusta, laid Georgia low and restored a 
royal government in that state. Heartened by these successes 
and strengthened by re-enforcements from the north, the 
enemy pushed northward into South Carolina, and laying 
siege to Charleston forced its capitulation. In this crisis con¬ 
gress insisted on sending Gates to take command in the south, 
disregarding the protest of Washington, who urged Greene for 
the task; and Gates, with about two thousand continentals de¬ 
tached from Washington's army and such militia as he could 
gather, gave hurried battle to Cornwallis at Camden, S. C. 
Gates was defeated and his defeat became a rout. His re¬ 
treat did not stop until he had reached Hillsboro, N. C., two 
hundred miles to the north. 

The Carolinas were now defenseless, and there seemed 
no obstacle to Cornwallis's march into Virginia. Greene hast¬ 
ened south, took over the disorganized American forces, and 
avoiding pitched battles, successfully harassed and retarded 
the British progress, while General Morgan, with a separate 
command, operated against Tarleton. These latter forces, 
coming together at the Cowpens, fought an action in which the 
Americans were completely successful. Cornwallis now 
hastened his march northward, burning his baggage to make 
the more speed to unite with the British forces from the north 
and end the war in Virginia, as he was now confident he could 
do. Greene abandoned the pursuit, turned south, and in a 
campaign of great brilliance and unfailing resource completely 
retrieved the disasters the American cause had suffered in the 
southern department. 

This man had been a Quaker blacksmith before the war, 
but by application and virtually with no guidance but his own 
studies snatched from daily toil, had made himself accom¬ 
plished in mathematics and engineering. He gathered the 


78 


What of America? 


Rhode Island militia and joined Washington at Boston as soon 
as he heard the news from Massachusetts, being cast out by the 
Quakers for his zeal. His capacity in the opening campaigns 
of the war attracted Washington’s attention and his rise was 
rapid. As quartermaster general he performed marvels of 
organization in bringing order into that department after its 
breakdown under the management of congress, and his sub¬ 
sequent military career justifies the conclusion of the best 
opinion that in capacity for command, in strategy and in exe¬ 
cution he ranks second only to Washington himself. 

In a campaign of ten months Greene had delivered three 
states from the enemy. When asked for the secret of his 
success he said: “We fight, get beaten, and fight again.” 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


79 


It is impossible for me briefly to communicate the 
fund of intelligence which I have derived from General 
Washington, I will now say only, that I have formed as 
high an opinion of the powers of his mind, his modera¬ 
tion, his patriotism, and his virtues, as I had before con¬ 
ceived, from common report, of his military talents, and 
of the incalculable services which he has rendered his 
country ,—The French Minister Gerard to the Count de 
Vergennes. 

XXIV. 

The World Turned Upside Down. 

ORNWALLIS reached Virginia in May, 1781, and 
took over the command of the British forces 
that had been operating there under Arnold. A 
campaign of devastation followed. The state 
was defenseless save for a small force under 
Lafayette. Jefferson, who was then governor, 
raised all the militia it was possible to gather, 
but could not prevent the immense destruction of property that 
now went on. Even his own estates were plundered. Horses 
and cattle were slaughtered, crops were burned, buildings 
destroyed. Cornwallis was now applying the methods he 
counted on to end the war, having at last gained the ear of 
the British ministry and triumphed over Clinton, his personal 
enemy, who had tried to recall him to New York. 

But there was an eye on Cornwallis’s movements that 
never erred in detecting an opportunity, and when the Brit¬ 
ish general fixed his base at Yorktown, Washington in the 
north saw the hour was come for a great stroke. He directed 
the concentration of the French fleet in the Chesapeake and 
turning south with his own and Rochambeau’s forces invested 
Yorktown. De Grasse held the bay and the British general 
was neatly bottled. 

Washington’s movements had been rapid. He had slipped 
away from Clinton in September, the latter believing that the 
concentration of the American and French forces was designed 
for an attack on New York, and early in October the invest¬ 
ment of Yorktown was complete. Cornwallis had been quick 
to perceive his mistake in occupying the end of a narrow pen¬ 
insula without being certain of command of the sea. He in¬ 
formed Clinton in New York that unless relief reached him 
















80 


What of America? 



the worst must be expected. Clinton’s feelings toward Corn¬ 
wallis were such that perhaps the expectation of the worst 
was not wholly a disagreeable one; at any rate Clinton ex¬ 
hibited no hurry, but promised relief before the end of October. 

Washington valued time more highly. He pushed his 
operations with the greatest vigor. The British works were 
taken one by one, by trench operations that steadily pushed in 
Cornwallis’s lines and reduced the compass of his defenses. 
His sallies were all defeated, his redoubts occupied, and con¬ 
fined at last within his inner fortifications and with the hope 
of timely succor gone, he capitulated on October 18. He laid 


THE SURRENDER OF LORD CORNWALLIS AT YORKTOWN TO THE AMERICAN AND 
FRENCH FORCES, WHICH ENDED THE BRITISH MILITARY RESISTANCE IN THE 
WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE. 

down seven thousand muskets and marched out between the 
lines of the victorious allies while the band played 'The 
World Turned Upside Down.” 

Horace Walpole’s question and answer, “What has an 
pmy of fifty thousand men, fighting for sovereignty, achieved 
in America? Retreated from Boston, retreated from Phila¬ 
delphia, laid down their arms at Saratoga,” had been finding 
an increasing echo in England. Public feeling was divided 
between discouragement over the length and futility of the 
war, and disgust over its conduct by the government. 

















Shall This Government Live or Lie? 


81 


Lord Germaine trotting off to a week-end party with for¬ 
gotten orders for over-seas in his pocket; parliament, when it 
was too late, complacently voting to restore the status quo; 
the king stubbornly urging on hostilities, and the ministers 
allowing generals to understand tacitly that too much activity 
need not be shown; Clinton and Cornwallis intriguing against 
each other; the public debt piling up; continental powers 
declaring war; the export trade ruined; home industries stag¬ 
nated ; these spectacles and these results, long before Corn¬ 
wallis’s surrender, had produced a peace party in England 
that now was strong enough to raise its voice in parliament. 

It hardly needed that voice to tell the parliament the end 
was come. Lord North threw up his arms at the news from 
Yorktown. “O God, it is all over!” he exclaimed. The house 
of commons voted an address to the king declaring those were 
''enemies to his majesty and the country” who should advise 
him to continue the war. North relinquished office, the Whigs 
came in and the government at once opened negotiations with 
PYanklin, who was at Paris. The long struggle was over and 
independence was won. 

But no American who is familiar with the deeds of the 
great leader who brought this result about should be un¬ 
familiar with the words in which that leader warned his 
countrymen of the unsoundness of the military policy on which 
the war was conducted. These are the words of the victorious 
Washington, written to congress: 

"Had we formed a permanent army in the beginning 
which, by the continuance of the same men in service, had been 
capable of discipline, we never should have had to retreat 
with a handful of men across the Delaware in 1776, trembling 
for the fate of America, which nothing but the infatuation of 
the enemy could have saved; we should not have remained all 
the succeeding winter at their mercy, with sometimes scarcely 
a sufficient body of men to mount the ordinary guards, liable 
at every moment to be dissipated, if they had only thought 
proper to march against us; we should not have been under 
the necessity of fighting at Brandywine, with an unequal num¬ 
ber of raw troops, and afterwards of seeing Philadelphia fall 
a prey to a victorious army; we should not have been at Valley 
Forge with less than half the force of the enemy, destitute of 
everything, in a situation neither to resist nor retire; we should 
not have seen New York left with a handful of men, yet an 
overmatch for the main army of these states, while the prin¬ 
cipal part of their force was detached for the reduction of 
two of them; we should not have found ourselves this spring 
so weak as to be insulted by five thousand men, unable to pro¬ 
tect our baggage and magazines, their security depending on a 
good countenance, and a want of enterprise in the enemy; we 


82 


What of America? 


should not have been the greatest part of the war inferior to 
the enemy, indebted for our safety to their inactivity, endur¬ 
ing frequently the mortification of seeing inviting opportunities 
to ruin them pass unimproved for want of a force, which the 
country was completely able .to afford; and of seeing the 
country ravaged, our towns burnt, the inhabitants plundered, 
abused, murdered with impunity from the same cause/^ 

Washington won the war in spite of these defects in the 
colonial military system. America cannot afford to again try 
that system until she is sure she has another Washington. 



Shall This Government Live or Die? 


83 


That in the creation of the United States the world 
had reached one of the turning points in its history, 
seems at the time to have entered into the thought of not 
a single European statesman. —John Richard Green, His¬ 
tory of the English People. 

XXV. 


The United States Under the Articles of Confederation. 


HAT ^ ^vere the thirteen states which his Brit- 
tanic majesty, signing at Paris by the hand of 
David Hartley, acknowledged on September 3, 
1783, to be free, sovereign and independent 
states? In the Declaration of Independence 
they had been styled the United States of Amer¬ 
ica. Following the promulgation of that docu¬ 
ment congress had appointed a committee “to prepare and 
digest the form of confederation to be entered into between 
these states.'’ That committee reported a draft of “articles of 
confederation and perpetual union” between the states, and it 
was debated, revised and finally adopted by the congress on 
November 15, 1777. 

It was determined, however, that the articles of confedera¬ 
tion should not become effective until ratified by all the states, 
and this unanimity was not effected until March 1, 1781, when 
Maryland, the last state to act, gave in its adhesion. 

The first article of this instrument read, “The stile of this 
confederacy shall be The United States of America.’ ” 

That confederacy existed from 1781 to 1789, and we have 
now to see what it was and why it was superseded by the 
government under which we now live. 

The confederation, as plainly appears from the articles, 
did not contemplate a national unity nor a national government 
for the states. Their union was only a “firm league of friend¬ 
ship.” Each state remained sovereign except as to certain 
specified powers expressly delegated to congress. These 
jjowers chiefly concerned the common defense. 

No executive was provided except congress, which body 
was elected annually or “appointed in such manner as the 
legislature of each state shall direct,” and each state was repre¬ 
sented by not less, than Jwo nor more than seven members. 
Voting in congress was by states, and each state, no matter 
how many delegates it had, had one vote. 
















84 


What of America? 


A “committee of the states” was provided to exercise the 
powers of congress when that body was not in session, the com¬ 
mittee consisting of one member from each state. The articles 
conferred no powers of taxation upon congress and none for 
the regulation of commerce, these powers being reserved to 
the states. The expenses of government were apportioned 
among the states on the basis of the value of the land they 



THE BOUNDARIES OF THE UNITED STATES, AS FIXED BY THE TREATY UNDER 
WHICH BRITAIN ACKNOWLEDGED AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE. 


contained. Congress merely estimated the expenses and the 
states laid and collected the taxes necessary to meet their 
quotas. 

Congress made war and peace, coined money, adminis¬ 
tered the postal service, made treaties, appointed officers to 
military and naval commands and exercised other specified 
















Shall. This Government Live or Die^ 85 

powers pertaining to the general defense and welfare. But it 
could do none of these things without the assent of nine states. 

This plan of government failed to work from the start, and 
its defects were no less apparent in peace than they had been 
in war. Its main defects were that congress could raise no 
revenue, but only ask the states for it, and that it had no power 
to enforce obedience from the states. The result was that the 
states complied with or refused requests for revenue, as they 
chose. Some paid and some didn’t. The year the confedera¬ 
tion went into effect, for example, congress, estimated it would 
need eight million dollars for common purposes and this sum 
was requisitioned. More than a year later the collections had 
reached no more than one-half million dollars. 

The treaty of Paris provided that private debts on both 
sides should be paid, and that neither country should raise any 
impediment to their recovery. But about half the states imme¬ 
diately passed laws violating this article and congress was 
helpless to do anything about it. 

The war had created a national debt. Money was not 
only owing at home and abroad, but to the army; but con¬ 
gress was powerless to satisfy the public creditor and even to pay 
the soldiers. Washington’s personal appeal to the latter alone 
prevented mutiny. In preparing to read a statement to a dele¬ 
gation of the soldiers, the general was obliged to hunt for his 
spectacles. 

“You see,” he said, “I have even lost my eyesight in your 
service.” 

The decided effect of the confederation was to extend ir¬ 
responsible state authority and limit that of the general gov¬ 
ernment. The state even paid the salaries of its congressmen, 
and as they could be recalled and others sent in their places 
at any time, they felt their responsibilities were wholly to 
the state rather than to the union. The voting in congress 
was, moreover, highly unequal, Virginia with a population 
at the close of the Revolution of 532,000, and Massachusetts 
and Pennsylvania with 330,000 each, having exactly the same 
voting strength as Delaware with 37,000 people. This in¬ 
equality and the necessary assent of nine states to public meas¬ 
ures made the defeat of what may be called national legisla¬ 
tion easy. It was only with difficulty that congress mustered 
the votes necessary to ratify the treaty of peace. 

In New York the assembly, under the leadership of Alex¬ 
ander Hamilton, had passed as early as 1782 a resolution for a 
convention of the states. Similar action was taken by other 
states, and in Virginia steps were taken that led in 1786 to a 
convention at Annapolis where five states were represented. 
This convention, however, took no action other than to recom- 


86 


What of America? 


mend that another convention be called to meet in Philadel¬ 
phia in May, 1787. Congress, acting*on this recommendation, 
issued the call, but as there was much opposition and distrust 
of the proceeding, took pains to specify that the meeting was 
to be “for the sole purpose of revising the Articles of Confed¬ 
eration.” 

It was this convention at Philadelphia that made the Con¬ 
stitution of the United States a work declared by Gladstone 
to be the most wonderful ever struck off at a given time by 
the brain and purpose of man. 


Shall This Goveknment Live gr Die? 


87 


If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves 
disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work ?— 
Washington as President of the Constitutional Conven¬ 
tion. 

Be assured, Wdshington^s influence carried this gov¬ 
ernment. —James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson. 

XXVI. ... 

The Making of the Constitution. 

N MAY 14, 1787, the day appointed for the con¬ 
stitutional convention to meet, a quorum of seven 
states was not present, and it was not until May 
25 that the convention organized with twenty- 
nine delegates answering the roll. On that roll 
were many famous names, and more were to 
appear on it as the belated delegations came in. 

From New York came Alexander Hamilton, already dis¬ 
tinguished as a soldier, but with his greatest fame yet to 
make. Among those from Pennsylvania were Robert Morris, 
financier of the Revolution; Gouverneur Morris and the great 
and venerable Dr. Franklin. Virginia sent George Washing¬ 
ton, James Madison, Edmund Randolph and George Mason, 
who, with others less known, made up the strongest delega¬ 
tion in the convention. Two of them were to be President 
of the United States. From Connecticut were Roger Sherman 
and Oliver Ellsworth, the latter to be a chief justice of the 
Supreme Court. Elbridge Gerry and Rufus King were there 
from Massachusetts; Gerry was to be vice-president of the 
United States and give us our word “gerrymander.” South 
Carolina sent John Rutledge and the two Pinckneys. From 
Delaware came John Dickinson, once a member of the Con¬ 
tinental congress from Pennsylvania, whose mother had told 
him, “Johnny, you will be hanged.” Perhaps it was this pre¬ 
diction Dickinson had in mind when he refused to sign the 
Declaration of Independence. 

The convention sat for four months, and its work was 
done in secret. Not until the .government published the jour¬ 
nal of Madison, after his death, was it definitely known by 
what processes the Constitution was wrought. During the ses¬ 
sions of the convention the wildest outside rumors were afloat. 
It was asserted a monarchy was being set up and orders of 
nobility created, and these reports received so much popular 














88 


AV H A T OF Am ER I c a ? 


belief that members of the convention found it necessary to 
deny them. But at no time were any reports of what actually 
did transpire behind the closed doors of the statehouse offi¬ 
cially given out. 

There was but one man in that gathering who could be 
considered for its presiding officer, and George Washington 



EDMUND RANDOLPH. 

was called to the chair. It is worthy of note, as again evidenc¬ 
ing the universal respect and veneration in which he was held, 
that the convention adopted a rule that upon each day’s ad¬ 
journment every member should stand in his place until Wash¬ 
ington had passed before him. He was conducted to the chair 
by Robert Morris and John Rutledge. Washington, owing 
to his position as presiding officer, took no part in the con- 



Shall This Government Live or Die? 89 

vention’s debates, except that, on the last day of its sessions, 
he said a few words in support of an amendment respecting 
the basis of representation in the lower house of congress. The 
amendment was instantly agreed to. 

All of the thirteen states ultimately were represented in 
the convention except Rhode Island. The New Hampshire 
delegates, however, did not take their seats until June 23. 
The voting was by states. 

It soon became apparent that there were wide diversities 
of opinion as to a scheme of government. The first presented 
was in a series of fifteen resolutions explained by Randolph 
and known as the Virginia plan. Their author was Madison. 
Charles Pinckney presented a plan to which some mystery at¬ 
taches. The draft, which was referred to a committee, never 
afterwards was found. One was supplied many years later 
by Pinckney himself, which bore a striking resemblance to 
the Constitution as it was adopted, but if Pinckney supplied it 
from memory he may unconsciously have drawn on the Consti¬ 
tution more than from memory. 

Many students of the Constitution now trace both the 
Madison and Pinckney plans, as well as that of Hamilton and 
the so-called New Jersey plan, to one Pelatiah Webster, a Yale 
political economist, who as early as 1783 put forth a pam¬ 
phlet proposing a scheme of government embodying the main 
essentials of the present federal system. 

The Virginia plan called for two branches of a national 
legislature, one house to be elected by the legislatures of the 
states and the other by the people; an executive elected by 
the national legislature; and provided that suffrage in the 
states should be based on the amount of revenue they paid into 
the national treasury or on population. 

The debate on this plan revealed a strong distrust of 
democracy. Gerry of Massachusetts objected to the popular 
election of the lower house. He said the country had too much 
democracy already. His state had just had experience of it in 
Shay’s rebellion, caused by the desire of the people to escape 
their debts. ‘The people,” he said, “are led into the most 
baneful measures by the false reports of designing men.” 

The debate on the executive was equally vigorous. Ran¬ 
dolph himself was for a three-headed executive. A single 
executive, he said, savored of monarchy. He would have the 
country divided into three sections, with one member of a 
triumvirate elected from each. He urged a seven-year term 
Curiously, that term remained the favorite throughout the ses¬ 
sions of the convention and stood in the completed document 
when it was turned over to the committee of detail. 

Sherman of Connecticut, Wilson of Pennsylvania, and Rut¬ 
ledge of South Carolina argued for a single executive, Sher- 


90 


What of Amfrica? 


man favoring the addition to the executive of a council of 
revision, the other two opposing a council. 

But when the question of representation came up Pat¬ 
terson of New Jersey challenged the whole procedure by re¬ 
minding the convention that it had no mandate to create a na¬ 
tional legislature at all. Its powers were limited, he declared, 
to a mere revision of the Articles of Confederation. “Can we,’* 
he asked, “form a government that destroys the sovereignty 
of the states that have sent us here to make their sovereignty 
more secure?” He ended by declaring New Jersey never 
would submit to the despotism of a national authority that 
should override its own. 

The New Jersey view was generally that of the smaller 
states. They were afraid of a representation in a national leg¬ 
islature based either on wealth or numbers, for they conceived 
-that under such a plan the wealthier and more populous states 
would force arbitrary rule upon the smaller ones. 

It was this cleavage of opinion and the state jealousy 
and fear it evidenced that for many weeks threatened the 
success of the convention’s task. 


Shall This Government Live .or Die? 


91 


State attachments and state importance have been 
the bane of this country. We cannot annihilate, but we 
may perhaps take out the teeth of the serpents .— 
Gouverneur Morris in the Constitutional Convention. 

By adopting this Constitution we shall become a na¬ 
tion; we are not one now. *We shall form a national 
character; we are now too dependent on others. —James 
Wilson in the Constitutional Convention. 

XXVII. 


Hamilton’s Conception of Nationality. 

N JUNE 18, when the convention had been 
in session nearly five weeks, there rose in 
committee of the whole a member who had 
hitherto been silent, and addressed the chair. 
We may suppose all eyes were turned upon 
this figure, young, slender, handsome, for his 
fame already stood high. We may guess at the 
appearance he made from the portraits we have of him; he 
Vvas dressed with care; high collared, close fitting velvet coat 
displayed the manliness of his shoulders; his hair was tied 
back with a ribbon; there was lace at his throat and his 
finely shaped head was carried with confidence and a con¬ 
sciousness of the value of what was in it. 

We may suppose General Washington, in the chair, recog¬ 
nized him with peculiar graciousness, for he loved and ad¬ 
mired this leader of the New York delegation, who was 
young enough to have been his son; he loved him for the 
warmth and generosity of his nature, he admired him for 
his gallantry and great abilities. Those abilities Daniel Web¬ 
ster did not overstate when forty years later he describ’bd 
them in one of his gigantic figures. 

“He smote the rock of our national resources and abun¬ 
dant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead 
corpse of public credit and it sprang upon its feet.” 

Alexander Hamilton was now 30 years old and already 
stool at the head of the legal profession in New York. But 
his talents were not only legal; they were military, fiscal and • 
political. He had served on Washington's staff, and disclosed 
in that capacity military abilities of the highest order. In¬ 
deed, many years later when Washington was recalled from 














92 What or America! 

retirement during the French war scare and made commander- 
in-chief of the army, Hamilton was made second in command. 
Perhaps of all the men in the convention Hamilton was most 
responsible for its meeting. As early as 1780 he had proposed 
a convention of the states to form a closer federation, for his 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 


acute mind perceived that only nationality could save the 
liberties the war had won. We have his testimony that during 
the war the army, except for the personal influence of Wash¬ 
ington, would have obeyed state authority in preference to 
that of congress. He denounced t^e government of the Con¬ 
federation as fit neither for peace nor war. Retiring from 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 93 

the congress of the Confederation he became a member of the 
New York legislature, and there took the lead in the move¬ 
ment that led to the Philadelphia convention. 

Hamilton had only one intellectual peer in the convention. 
That was James Madison of Virginia. Madison believed in 
democracy, but a democracy to be governed by intellect. Hamil¬ 
ton did not believe in democracy, because he did not believe it 
could be trusted to give nationality to the country. Like Madi¬ 
son, he believed in the government of the fit, but he believed that 
could only be assured by a plan that would concentrate its 
powers in the hands of those who should be secure from the 
fickle gusts of popular passions. These two fine minds afford 
us a striking illustration of the nature and origin of the suc¬ 
cessive compromises that produced the Constitution. Hamil¬ 
ton and Madison stood there opposed on a fundamental prin¬ 
ciple of government. Their division was the line of political 
cleavage that was to produce the two great parties of later 
days; yet because both had a common objective they were 
presently, when the compromises were effected, to stand to¬ 
gether as the two chief advocates of the Constitution. Their 
names must be forever linked, for while as statesmen they 
were leaders of opposing political thought, as patriots they 
sank their differences and labored for the common good. If 
we want to see statesmanship in its highest application to the 
public welfare, the pages of “Th;e Federalist,” in which Ham¬ 
ilton and.Madison joined opposing minds to insure the adop¬ 
tion of the Constitution, will reveal it to us. 

The political differences that separated these two minds 
have continued to separate Americans to this day, but we now 
too rarely see in the contests of party the care for the preser¬ 
vation of the principle which underlies party and which is the 
only excuse for the existence of party, that these two leaders dis¬ 
played. Hamilton and Madison were able and ambitious men; 
but they knew what too many of our political leaders today 
forget, that the theory of party is simply a theory of govern¬ 
ment, and that the party that would impair government itself 
to gain its own ends has destroyed the sole legitimate reason 
for its being. Hamilton and Madison differed simply on the 
question of what was the best government, or as Hamilton 
put it in the convention, “The great question is, what pro¬ 
vision shall we make for the happiness of our country?” His 
own answer was. Give the people a government strong enough 
to control them. Madison’s answer was. Give the people a 
government they can control. 

Hamilton and Madison differed as much in person, char¬ 
acter and temperament as they did in political theory. Ham¬ 
ilton was bold, speculative, audacious, superbly self confident, 
carrying into politics the same dash and daring he had ex¬ 
hibited as a military leader. Madison was cautious, conserva- 


94 


What of America'? 


live, conciliatory in politics; in manner gentle and disarming, 
but with a quiet persistence that carried him far. In execu¬ 
tion he could not rival Hamilton, whose genius was construc¬ 
tive and the force of whose intellect overawed opposition, but 
Madison was the more successful in those arts by which public 



JAMES MADISON. 


opinion is molded and led. The Constitution bears more of 
his imprint than of Hamilton’s, which again goes to show that 
in politics the great solvent is compromise. 

Madison was more in his element in the constitutional con¬ 
vention than Hamilton was. Hamilton would haiVe been a 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 95 

more successful President than Madison was. Madison’s mind 
was the refining, the analytical, the adjusting type, but lacked 
the initiative and boldness essential to decisive action. As 
President his fame suffered. That of Hamilton would have 
grown in the chief magistracy. Madison, as was popularly 
said, had to be kicked into war. Hamilton always was ready 
to meet provocation a little more than half way. Madison 
shrank even from the harsh course of removing incompetent 
military commanders, believing every man’s motives and ac¬ 
tions to be as pure as his own. Hamilton, when his financial 
policy was attacked and had traced those attacks to Jefferson, 
promptly retaliated on the secretary of state and started a 
cabinet war that Washington had difficulty in stopping. 

But unalike as Hamilton and Madison were, there has 
been no happier alliance in our political history than was 
formed when they undertook to vindicate the work of the 
convention to the people of the states. The play of their 
minds was perfectly adjusted to their joint task; its execu¬ 
tion stands a monument to the constructive uses of political 
controversy. 

But the convention rejected the answers of both Hamil¬ 
ton and Madison, and by a middle course arrived at what 
promised to be a balance between the two extremes. We have 
now to examine the plan by which Hamilton proposed to 
achieve for America that nationality which to his mind ap¬ 
peared the only refuge of the states from dissolution and 
anarchy. 


96 


What of 


» 

Ameeica ? 




When a table is to be made, and the edges of the 
planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both and 
makes a good joint. —Benjamin Franklin, urging com¬ 
promise in the Constitutional Convention. 

XXVIII. 


The Compromises of the Constitution. 


HEN Hamilton rose with his plan, New Jersey, 
to meet the views of the smaller states, already 
had submitted through Mr. Patterson a plan of 
its own. It called for a national legislature of 
but one house with its powers derived from the 
states instead of from the people. The execu¬ 
tive was to be plural. The power of the legisla¬ 
ture was to be limited, like that of the congress under the 
Articles of Confederation. 

Madison and Wilson spoke strongly against the New Jer¬ 
sey plan. It was, they pointed out, a mere patchwork of the 
Confederation which already had broken down. Hamilton 
now advanced the bold proposition that the states ought vir¬ 
tually to be extinguished. He could see no necessity for them 
in any plan that aimed at nationality. He did not scruple to 
declare, that in theory, the British government was the best 
in the world. The house of lords, as being a permanent inter¬ 
est interposed between the crown and the commons, a bul¬ 
wark against the encroachments of both, he regarded as ‘‘a 
noble institution,” but could see no hope of its counterpart in 
America. As to an executive, he doubted if a good one could 
be established on republican principles, and a good executive 
he deemed indispensable to good government. He was aware, 
however, that the convention must adhere to the republican 
principle, and falling in with that necessity he offered a plan \ 
that would, he believed, give to such a government the cen¬ 
tralized powers necessary to its stability. His plan was for a 
national legislature or congress composed of an assembly and 
a senate; the assembly to be chosen by the people for three 
years, the senate to be chosen for life, by electors chosen by the 
people. The executive, called a governor, was to be chosen 
for life by electors. The federal government was to appoint 
the governors of the states, and all state laws not in conformity 
with the laws of the United States were to be void. The mili¬ 
tia of the states was to be under the direct and sole control 















Shall This Government Live or Die! 97 

of the United States and to be officered by appointment by the 
national executive. This was the strongest note of nationalism 
sounded in the convention, and, as it transpired, was too strong 
for it. 

At the conclusion of the debates on the various plans the 
convention voted in committee to report the Virginia plan, 
which thus, before the end of June, came formally before the 
convention for debate and amendment. 

Again the question of representation furnished the issue 
for contention. States' rights, equality, no despotism, were the 
rallying cries of the smaller states. The debates became bitter. 
Bedford of Delaware declared that sooner than be crushed by 
their neighbors the small states would invite a foreign power 
to take them by the hand. 

“Take a foreign power by the hand!" cried Rufus King, 
springing to his feet. “I am sorry the gentleman said that. I 
hope he can excuse the remark on the ground of passion." 

The alignment of the states on this question of voting power 
in the national legislature was now as follows: For representa¬ 
tion in both houses on the basis of wealth and population, stood 
Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, North and South Carolina 
and Georgia. For equal suffrage in both houses, stood New 
Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland and Delaware. Rhode Island and 
New Hampshire were not represented, and New York’s delega¬ 
tion was split. 

The temper of the convention was now such that it could 
make no progress in any direction, and South Carolina moved 
that the question be referred to a select committee. This was 
done and the convention recessed for three days while the com¬ 
mittee fought the issue out. 

The committee reported on July 5 a compromise measure 
by which representation in the lower house of congress should 
be on the basis of population, and in the upper house be equal. 
As a further balancing of powers it was recommended that all 
revenue bills should originate in the popular branch. The report 
further recommended that the representation in the popular 
branch should be on the basis of one delegate for every forty 
thousand inhabitants, counting three-fifths of all persons not free, 
except Indians. This was a concession to the South, which would 
thus gain representation for three out of five of its slaves. 

When this report was read two delegates from New York 
withdrew from the convention. On July 17 the debate on the 
method of electing the executive came on and Gouverneur Morris 
contended for his election by the people. The executive, he said, 
if elected by the legislature and made impeachable by it, could 
only be the creature of that body. If the people elected him he 
would be a man of continental reputation; their choice would be 
free; if the congress elected him it would be by intrigue, cabal 
and faction. 


98 


What of America? 


Sherman of Connecticut doubted if the people would take a 
continental view.' He thought they would vote for a man from 
their own state, and that nobody would have a majority of the 
votes. The most populous state would have the best chance of 
electing its man. On the question being submitted only Pennsyl¬ 
vania voted for election by the people. 

As the work of the convention neared its end much unfin¬ 
ished business was left to select committees where compromises 
were threshed out. Among other subjects this of the election 
of the executive was so referred, and on September 4, a com¬ 
mittee that had been appointed to consider it vested the election 
in a body of electors to be appointed by the state legislatures, such 
electors to be equal in number to the whole number of senators 
and representatives. 

On September 8 a committee on style was appointed to 
revise and arrange the articles as agreed upon. The committee 
consisted of Madison, Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, King and 
Johnson. The document was engrossed on September 15 and two 
days later was laid before the convention to be signed. Franklin 
made a plea for unanimity, but it was futile. Of the fifty-five 
delegates present only thirty-nine signed. Washington signed 
first. Franklin, defeated in his attempt to win over the sixteen 
irreconcilables, had still a last word of cheery good hope. 

On the wall behind Washington’s chair was a painting of a 
sunrise. As the members were signing Franklin pointed to this, 
and said that painters had difficulty in distinguishing on canvas 
a rising from a setting sun. 

"‘Often,” he said, “in the course of these sessions I have 
looked at that picture without being able to tell whether the sun 
was rising or setting. But now, at length, I have the happiness 
to know it is a rising and not a setting sun.” 


Shall This Government Live or Die'? 


99 


It is a matter, both of wonder and regret, that those 
who raise so many objections against the new Constitu¬ 
tion, should never call to mind the defects of that which 
is to be exchanged for it. No man would refuse to give 
brass for silver or gold because the latter had some alloy 
in it. —James Madison, the Federalist, No. XXXVIII. 

XXIX. 


The First Battle for Nationality. 

HE struggle for the ratification of the Constitution 
by the states, nine of which were required to ac¬ 
cept it before the government could be set up, was 
one of the greatest political contests this country 
has seen. The question of ratification was de¬ 
termined by conventions elected in the different 
states, and these elections and the contests that 
followed in the conventions continued from December, 1787, when 
Delaware led off by ratifying, to May, 1790, when Rhode Island 
came in. New Hampshire turned the scale for the Constitution, 
however, when it ratified as the ninth state, in June, 1788. The 
United States began without either Rhode Island or North Caro¬ 
lina. 

Broadly the contest was one between property and com¬ 
mercial interests on the one hand and those represented by the 
mass of the people, who feared the domination of wealth and 
what they called aristocracy, on the other. The Constitutionalists 
or Federalists, as they came to be called, were for the strong 
central government, the security of property and the taxing 
power the Constitution promised, while the Anti-Federalists, 
distrustful of authority, and fearful of taxes, were for the loose 
and feeble order of the Confederation. 

The opposition to the Constitution was strongest in New. 
York, Massachusetts, Virginia, North Carolina and Rhode Island; 
but everywhere the farmers, the workers and the debtor class 
were counted against it. The Constitution was denounced as a 
work of darkness, an instrument of monarchy, a gilded chain with 
which the rich would shackle the poor. Orators on both sides 
stormed the towns and villages. A war of pamphlets raged. 
The Anti-Federalists hurled argument, ridicule, invective, abuse. 
The new government, it was charged, would confiscate every 
man’s property. Instead- of one taxing power there would now 
be two. There was no bill of rights in the Constitution, and 
the liberties of America would be snatched away. A state church 















100 


What of America! 


was to be set up, and what was the senate but the beginning of a 
new house of lords? Senators, once chosen, the people were 
warned, would keep their offices for life. 

Misrepresentation was so wild in the opposition camp that 
a Federalist writer declared: “If every lie was to be punished 
by clipping, as in the case in other forgeries, not an ear would be 
left in the whole party.’’ 

A North Carolina candidate for the convention told the 
voters of that state that the new federal city (Washington) 
was to be walled in and fortified; that the government would 
collect an immense standing army there; and that this army, 
when all was ready, would march out to slaughter^ disarm and en¬ 
slave the people. This inspired orator was elected. 

Patrick Henry, standing in the Virginia convention and 
waving the Constitution in his hand, declared he knew of no 
document in history better calculated to make slaves of a people. 
And Henry ranked as a patriot. A New England editor wrote 
that the country could not remain democratic if consolidated 
under one government, and said: “You might as well try to rule 
hell by prayer.” 

Sharp political tactics were everywhere employed. In Penn¬ 
sylvania the legislature was about to adjourn without calling 
a convention. The Federalists thereupon seized two Anti-Fed¬ 
eralist members in their homes, dragged them to the state house 
and forcibly held them in their seats until a quorum could be 
counted. In Massachusetts the Federalists, to prevail upon the 
wavering John Hancock to lend the weight of his influence by 
serving as chairman of the convention, promised him the presi¬ 
dency of the United States, in case it should not go to Wash¬ 
ington. This probably was the first of American pre-convention 
political pledges. Perhaps, too, the first filibuster in American 
political history was that attempted by the Anti-Federalists in 
the Pennsylvania convention when one member spoke for nine 
hours, another for seven and a third for five; and when five days 
were taken up in a debate about the definition of the words 
“annihilation” and “consolidation.” 

The Anti-Federalists raised the cry of class with great 
effect. They did not hesitate to assail the greatest names. When 
Washington and Franklin were quoted as being for the Consti¬ 
tution it was retorted that Washington was a fool from nature 
and Franklin a fool from age. John Adams had employed a 
phrase about the “well-born” in a discussion of the desirability 
of a senate to attract ability. “The rich, the well-born and the 
able,” he had said, would be of service in it. This phrase was 
caught up by the Anti-Federalists who had great satisfaction in 
calling themselves the low-born. They inquired what part the 
low-horn—the men who had fought the war, suffered at Valley 
» Forge and had been dismissed without their pay—were going 



Shall This Government Live or Die? 


101 


to have in the new government. The senate was reserved for 
the well-born. The low-born were to pay the taxes to support it. 

The early ratification of Delaware, Pennsylvania and New 
Jersey, all of which acted before the close of 1787, and of 
Georgia and Connecticut which followed suit in January, 1783, 
threw a panic into the Anti-Federalists and they centered their 
efforts on Massachusetts, which was the next state to vote. The 
state was still strongly tinged with Shays sentiment, and many 
Shays followers were in the convention. Even Adams’s “well¬ 
born” were from political conviction opposed to giving up the 
state’s ancient privileges. The people were so suspicious of the 
whole proceeding that forty-six towns had refused to elect any 
delegates to the convention. The stoutest patriot of all, Sam 
Adams himself, was against the Constitution until a delegation 
of mechanics, headed by Paul Revere, put into his hands a peti¬ 
tion from the trades of Boston, praying him to support it. 

“How many of the Boston mechanics are for the Constitu¬ 
tion, Mr. Revere?” asked Adams. 

“More, sir, than there are stars in the sky,” replied Revere. 

Adams was convinced that the people were for the “New 
Roof,” as the Constitution was popularly called, and thereafter 
supported it. But the result was still feared by the Federalists, 
Rufus King writing to Madison that the people were filled with 
distrust because the men of property and education were in 
favor of the new government. 


102 


What of Ameeica? 


Were the pictures which have been drawn by polit¬ 
ical jealousy faithful likenesses of the human character, 
the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue 
among men for self-government; and that nothing less 
than the chains of despotism can restrain them from de¬ 
stroying and devouring one another. —James Madison, 
the Federalist, No. LV. 


XXX. 


How New York Was Forced Into the Union. 


S the contest went on the remark of Washington 
that “the opposition to the Constitution is ad¬ 
dressed more to the passions than to the reason'' 
was well illustrated. In the Massachusetts conven- 
.tion when it met the language of the Anti-Federal¬ 
ists was the language of frenzy. They attacked 
the makers and the supporters of the Constitu¬ 
tion more than the document itself. It fact,_ few outside of the 
opposition leaders seemed to know what was in the instrument, 
and this was true generally in the country. The lawyers, one 
member charged, were to be the beneficiaries of the new govern¬ 
ment. “The men of learning, the moneyed men, the fine talkers,'^ 
he said, “make us poor, illiterate people swallow down the pill. 
They mean to get all the money into their own hands, and then 
they will swallow up us little folk like the great Leviathan, Mr. 
President; yes, just as the whale swallowed up Jonah." 

Another member, waving away the great names paraded by 
the Federalists, declared that in this matter he “would not trust 
a flock of Moseses." 

A standing army, racks and gibbets would be the mildest of 
the “instruments of discipline" the federal government would 
employ, it was predicted. “Had I a voice like Jove," thundered 
another delegate, “I would proclaim it throughout the world; 
and had I an arm like Jove, I would hurl from the globe those 
villains that would dare to establish in our country a standing 
army." 

The result was long in doubt, and the slender victory the 
Federalists won when they carried the Constitution by a majority 
of twenty was only gained by their consent to accept some amend¬ 
ments to be proposed to congress. Even this compromise was de¬ 
nounced as the work of “Judases." 















Shall This Government Live or Die? 103 

Whoever walks down Federal street in Boston today can re¬ 
flect that it acquired its present name from the circumstance 
that this convention was held in a building that stood on that 
thoroughfare, then called Long Lane. 

Massachusetts ratified in February, 1788, and Maryland, 
South Carolina, New Hampshire and Virginia followed in the 
spring and summer of that year; and although the “New Roof” 
was now a certainty, all eyes turned on New York, where Tory¬ 
ism and anti-Federalism were known to be in a majority. 

Led by Governor Clinton, the combined enemies of the 
Constitution gained clear control of the convention, but they 
were in no hurry to act. They didn’t want to come into the 
Union, but they were not at all sure that they dared to stay out. 

The battle for ratification was led by Hamilton. His argu¬ 
ments were unanswerable, but Clinton had what, in politics, is 
more effective than the most convincing arguments. Clinton had 
the votes. He had, moreover, a kind of argument that struck 
nearer home to the self interest of the state. New York had 
the chief port of entry for the states and their carrying trade 
was largely in its hands. If New York stayed out and could 
induce Virginia and North Carolina, the great planter states, to 
stay out, too, they could join together and, taking in territory to 
the west, form a league of their own that would be a formidable 
rival to the United States. 

Such was Clinton’s plan. Governor Randolph of Virginia 
had refused to sign the Constitution at Philadelphia, and Clinton 
believed he would be against its ratification at Richmond. The 
New York governor broached his plan to the Virginia governor, 
and meanwhile the New York convention marked time. But com¬ 
munication was slow; Randolph, as it proved, was not an ir¬ 
reconcilable; he came round in the Virginia convention, and 
while Clinton was indulging his dream Virginia ratified. 

New York was now out on a limb. To stay out of the Union 
alone, or with only North Carolina and Rhode Island to keep her 
company, meant commercial ruin. The United States would 
erect customs barriers against her (as it actually did later in the 
case of Rhode Island) ; and so, after a month of bargaining in 
the convention, the Clinton forces finally agreed to ratify in ex¬ 
change for a long string of amendments. 

But party spirit did not regard the contest as closed. The 
struggle for the Constitution now became the struggle for con¬ 
trol of the electoral college, the elections for which had been 
fixed for the first Wednesday in January, 1789. It was bitterest 
in New York, where the law gave that office to the legislature. 

• There the Clinton Anti-Federalist forces held the assembly and 
the Federalists the senate. The result was a deadlock, the day 
passed without a choice, the legislature adjourned and New 
York paid for its politics by being deprived of a voice in the 
election of the first President of the United States. 


104 


What of America? 


The electors were not, as in our day, pledged to any candi¬ 
date for President or Vice-President. Their choice was free, ex¬ 
cept that in voting for two persons for these offices it was re¬ 
quired (as it still is) that one of them at least should not be an 
inhabitant of the same state with themselves. Until the twelfth 
amendment to the Constitution was adopted, in 1804, the electors 
did not vote for President and Vice-President separately, but 
simply for two persons, and of those two the one receiving the 
greatest number of votes became President and the other Vice- 
President. There was, therefore, in this first choice of electors 
no electioneering for candidates, the contest turning, as in that 
over the Constitution, on the issue of Federalism and Anti-Fed¬ 
eralism. But if the electors were unpledged, everybody knew on 
whom their choice for President would fall. The only uncertainty 
was over the choice for Vice-President, and here, indeed, there 
was some political intriguing not unworthy of the art as we know 
it today. The Anti-Federalists wanted Clinton for that place, and 
during the month that elapsed between the choice of electors 
and their meeting there were many ingenious attempts to keep 
votes from going to Adams. The opposition to Adams pretended 
to fear his vote would approach too close to Washington’s, and 
their concern was great. The way to avoid that unhappy result, 
they urged, was to vote for Clinton. 

The electors met the first Wednesday in February and cast a 
unanimous vote for George Washington for President. There 
were sixty-nine votes and Washingfon received sixty-nine. Adams 
was given thirty-four votes and became Vice-President. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


105 


Let the states, hound together in an indissoluble 
union, concur in erecting one great American system, 
superior to the control of all Trans-Atlantic force or in¬ 
fluence, and be able to dictate the terms of the connec¬ 
tion between the old and the new world. —Alexander 
Hamilton, The Federalist. No. XL 

XXXI. 


The Infancy of the ‘New Nation. 

ASHINGTON -was inaugurated in New York on 
April 30, 1789, the oath of office being admin¬ 
istered by Chancellor Livingston of that state on 
the balcony of Federal hall, at the corner of Broad 
and Wall streets. The event was notified to the 
crowds that packed the streets in the vicinity when 
the chancellor, advancing to the railing, cried out: 

‘Tt is done! Long live George Washington, President of the 
United States!” 

Thus began the history of the government under which we 
now live. 

Let us now take a look at the new nation that thus began 
its existence. Its territory extended along the Atlantic Coast 
from Maine, then a part of Massachusetts, to Spanish Florida; 
and westward to the Mississippi River. The territory now com¬ 
prising Vermont was claimed by both New York and New Hamp¬ 
shire. The great area now within the states of Ohio, Indiana, 
Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, and known as the Northwest 
Territory, had been ceded to the old Confederation by the states 
claiming it and was national domain. Kentucky was part of 
Virginia and Tennessee belonged to North Carolina. Georgia 
and South Carolina had title to the northern parts of what are 
now Alabama and Mississippi. To the south the nation was 
cut off from the Gulf of Mexico by the Spanish claims. 

The population that inhabited this extensive territory was 
under 4 million, and the greater part of it was distributed along 
the Atlantic seaboard. West of the mountains there were only a 
few settlements and military posts. The largest town was New 
York, which had 49,000 people, and Philadelphia was second 
with 28,000. Boston, Charleston and Baltimore were the only 
other towns of any size, having respectively about 18,000, 16,000 
and 13,000 people. 
















106 


What of America? 


The mass of the people that inhabited the states was provin¬ 
cial. Their minds were narrow and prejudiced, and their views 
were local. Their mutual intercourse was restricted by distance, 
the lack of means of communication and by widespread suspicion 
and distrust. Most of the people were poor. There was little 
money, and outside the towns barter was still a chief agency of 
trade. The houses were largely of the pioneer type and the fur¬ 
niture rude, and in the country districts the life of the people 
was hard to privation. 



GEORGE WASHINGTON, THE FIRST PRESIDENT, TAKING THE OATH OF OFFICE 
APRIL-30, 1789, AT FEDERAL HALL, NEW YORK, 

Nine-tenths of the people were farmers, but they merely 
scratched the soil. Charles Newbold, Richard Chenaworth and 
Jethro Wood had not then introduced the iron plowshare, and 
the implement still used was of the rudest description. It was 
made of wood, with perhaps an old horseshoe for a blade. The 
handle was a forked tree branch. Very little land was thoroughly 
cleared. Stumps of trees stood in the fields and only the most 


































































































































































































































































































































































































Shall. This Government Live or Die? 107 

tractable land was cultivated. Crops, of course, were meager 
and usually sufficed only for the settlers’ own needs. The harvest 
methods were as rude as the planting. Wheat was cut with a 
sickle and threshed on the ground with flails. 

The coast towns had built up some commerce. New England 
fish, lumber and furs found their way to foreign markets and 
the South exported tobacco. There was little manufacturing 
anywhere. Most household articles were fashioned by the people 
themselves. 

To a people thus isolated, and thus reliant on themselves and 
their communities, the sense of nationality would come slowly; 
and to appreciate how complete that isolation was we need only 
consider the methods of travel and its facilities. Roads in the 
modern sense scarcely existed. As soon as the towns were left 
behind they became mere trails through the woods, full of stumps 
and mudholes. The traveler who wanted to make speed would 
go on horseback; he usually forsook the road and followed paths 
scarcely discernible except to the initiated. Sticking to the 
road (and frequently in it) the traveler by stage coach would 
take a week to go from Boston to New York, and this was the 
best and most traveled road in the country. It took three weeks 
to go from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and $120 a ton was 
charged for freight on goods between these points. 

But even between New York and Boston travel was not 
heavy. Two coaches were enough to take care of it, and as 
nobody traveled for pleasure the proprietors of these conveyances 
did not find it necessary to make them comfortable or attractive. 
They were ramshackle affairs drawn by horses in rope harnesses. 
Travel was by daylight only; at night the passengers slept in 
roadside inns as rude as their conveyance. Forty miles a day, 
with two relays of horses was good speed; but to attain it the 
passengers had frequently to get out and help pull the coach out 
of the ruts. 

There were the beginnings of postal communication, and on 
the foundation of the system laid by Benjamin Franklin a service 
was built up thought to be truly marvelous in that day. There 
was a mail every day between the principal towns, but it was of 
a business nature and correspondents wrote in cipher, for the 
risk of safe delivery was great. Social correspondence was hardly 
known. Thus the people in one state did not know what was 
going on in another, nor indeed in their own, nor what their fel¬ 
low citizens elsewhere were talking or thinking about. 

The newspapers, which were few and small, were printed 
and circulated only in the larger towns. The inhabitants of the 
settlements rarely saw one. In Connecticut, in the year of the 
Constitution, there were but four newspapers; and in one of its 
principal towns there were but four newspaper subscribers. In 
Virginia, shortly before, there was but one newspaper. It ap¬ 
peared twice a week. What really was news in these papers. 


108 


What of America! 


and it was very little, was old when it appeared. Foreign news 
might be months old; the domestic variety was too likely to be 
inaccurate or strongly tinged by the bitterest party spirit. Public 
men were cudgeled in print by partisan editors; ‘‘A Gentleman 
Recently Returned From Georgia” would contribute a letter on 
his experiences; there would be an account, drawn from vague 
sources, of the doings of the British on the western frontier; a 
report, as uncertain, that the Kentuckians had clashed with the 
Spaniards on the Mississippi. Public information, in any real 
sense, there was none, and no public opinion except what might 
be formed at the tavern. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


109 


If we should he disunited, and the integral parts 
should he thrown into two or three confederacies, we 
should he in the same predicament as the continental 
powers of Europe. Our liberties would he a prey to the 
means of defending ourselves against the ambition and 
jealousy of each other. —Alexander Hamilton, The Fed¬ 
eralist, No. VIII. 


XXXII. 


Localism the Foe of Nationality. 

DUCATION in the young America, except for the 
well-to-do who could send their children to private 
schools, was almost unattainable. In the northern 
and central states there were the beginnings of a 
public school system, but it depended pretty much 
on the voluntary efforts of the local districts what 
was made of it. In the South there were hardly 
any schools at all. Back in the time of Charles II when the Vir¬ 
ginia commissioners had asked for help for schools, secular and 
religious, the king’s law minister had replied: 

“Damn your souls! Grow tobacco!” 

And the South had grown tobacco. Even where schools 
existed. North or South, they taught little, for the teachers them¬ 
selves were usually but youths struggling to get through the 
academies in the towns, and rarely competent to instruct the 
farmers’ sons and daughters in anything but the rudiments. In 
these country districts the pupils might walk many miles, through 
woods infested with bears and wolves, to meet their teacher and 
learn to “cypher” on birch bark. For this service the teacher 
might receive $3 a month and his board. 

In the towns the minister might eke out his living by taking 
private pupils, and sometimes schooling was a side line with 
others besides ministers, as Anthony McDonald’s sign seems to 
show: 

“Anthony McDonald teaches boys and girls their grammar 
tongue; also geography terrestrial and celestial—Old hats made as 
good as new.” 

The character, habits and social life of the people differed 
widely. Were they northerners, were they southerners, were 
they townspeople, were they backwoods settlers, they had cus¬ 
toms and traits of their own that stamped each class as foreign 
to the others. The Virginian might be either the cultured and 

















110 


What of America? 


aristocratic lowlander who dwelt in his spacious mansion, dressed 
in silk and wore a wig, or he might be the rude cabin dweller 
of the mountains with his uncleared land, his dog and his gun. 
The New Englander could be the prosperous merchant of Boston 
or one of those deluded rustics who seized gun or pitchfork and 
followed Daniel Shays. In Pennsylvania, too, could be found both 
the solid Quaker farmer with furniture of black walnut and his 
fellow citizen of the forest who lived in one room with an earthen 
floor. 

These classes had little in common, and yet something. 
Wherever we find our ancestors they were likely to be hard 
drinkers. The well-to-do surrounded their drinking with social 
forms, and took off their bumpers in toasts for which they could 
find a dozen good excuses at every meal. Other people drank 
when and where they could. All classes were fond of sport. The 
southerner raced horses and rode to hounds. Those who could 
not afford those diversions fought cocks. Men were ready to 
fight each other, too, and on slight provocation. Public brawls 
were so common as to attract little attention, least of all that of 
the law. 

Government of any kind indeed our ancestors saw little evi¬ 
dence of up to 1790, and cared as little to see it. The mass of the 
people wanted nothing so much as to be let alone. They pre¬ 
ferred to take care of themselves, and didn’t see why it should 
be necessary to pay taxes to government for that privilege. If 
to take care of themselves the more conveniently they congregated 
in small towns and settlements, the government of that com¬ 
munity was government enough. They scarcely knew any other 
up to the time of the Constitution. The government of the state 
was light, that of England had been far. General Knox, writing 
to Washington at the time of the fight for the Constitution in 
Massachusetts, said the trouble was that the people of that state 
were against “the existence of all government whatever.” 

But if the Americans of that day lacked many things we 
noW' think of as being essentials of a civilization, they had in 
plenty at least two things now not so easily acquired. Food and 
land were both cheap. On the table of the poorest settler were 
turkey, pork, beef, duck, chicken and cider. But Jefferson 
notes that Americans of that day ate few vegetables or fruit. 
Only the commonest vegetables were known, and few took the 
trouble to grow them. Animal diet was too plentiful and cheap. 

Land could be had almost anywhere for the settling. The 
pioneer would scratch it for a season or two and move on. When 
Georgia, to replenish its treasury, sold to a company of land pro¬ 
moters almost the whole of what is now the state of Alabama, the 
price was about a cent an acre. This and other western land 
was resold to settlers for 12 and 14 cents an acre. Everybody 
sought to become rich from the land, but not by cultivating it. 
But for all the feverish activity there was little wealth in the 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


Ill 


country in the early years of the young republic. The taxable 
value of all the land in which so many were speculating was not 
half a million dollars. The richest man in the United States 
was Washington, whose fortune probably was less than half a 
million dollars, and was largely in land, much of which was pro¬ 
ductive of no income. 

Such was the country of which Josiah Tucker, dean of Glou¬ 
cester, made this prediction: “As to the future grandeur of 
America, and its being a rising empire under one head, whether 
republican or monarchical, it is one of the idlest and most vision¬ 
ary notions that ever was conceived even by writers of romance,” 


112 


What of America? 


The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the 
solid basis of the consent of the people. The streams 
of national power ought to flow immediately from that 
pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority .— 
Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, No. XXII. 

XXXIII. 


The Birth of the Party System. 


ITH the beginning of the government under the Con¬ 
stitution there came gradually into existence the 
two great political parties, which, under various 
names, have continued down to the present time. 
The Constitution being an accomplished fact, 
everybody, of course, was for it; but not every¬ 
body thought alike as to just what it meant or as 
to how it should be interpreted and applied. It was on these 
points that the parties divided and began that political contest 
which must continue as long as men do not think alike on theories 
of government. 

These parties may be best described as the broad construc¬ 
tionists and the strict constructionists. 

The broad constructionists believed that the powers of the 
federal government were very extensive; that the Constitution 
was a very flexible instrument that might be stretched to any 
length that the public welfare seemed to require. The other 
view was that the powers of the government were limited to those 
expressly delegated by the Constitution; that these powers were 
delegated by the states and that all powers not so expressly dele¬ 
gated were reserved to the states. 

This was a controversy bound to arise under a dual system 
of government. If the states were sovereign, as they claimed to 
be, and the United States was also sovereign, as it must be if it 
was to stand, where was the dividing line between their powers? 

The government under the old confederation undoubtedly had 
been a government of the states—the articles declared it to be 
such. The preamble to the Constitution as reported to the Phila¬ 
delphia convention by the committee of detail began, “We, the 
people of the states,” and named them. As finally reported by the 
committee on style and as adopted, the preamble began, “We, 
the people of the United States.” 

This declaration roused much opposition in the states when 
the Constitution came up for ratification. Patrick Henry was 














Shall This Government Live or Die? 113 

one of those who attacked it. The old government could act only 
on the states; the new one, it was perceived, would act directly 
on individuals. The question whether an individual was a citizen 
of his state or of the United States was at the bottom of the long 
controversy that raged over states’ rights, and was finally de¬ 
termined by the fourteenth amendment: “All persons born or 
naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction 
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein 
they reside.” 

But the arguments for the federal power that went to this 
conclusion were not accepted at first. The states were jealous of 
their powers and continued to assert them, and but for the 
judicial power established in the Constitution it is probable the 
conflict between the state and federal power would have quickly 
brought about disunion. But the Constitution provided an au¬ 
thority to decide these questions. The supreme court has been 
described as the noblest work of the founding fathers, and by 
its authority the compromises of the Constitution have been so 
interpreted as to render the whole enduring. The Constitution 
was made workable by judicial interpretation. 

The supreme court’s labors in this field have'been monu¬ 
mental. It has made innumberable decisions on every clause in 
the Constitution. On the preamble itself, which contains only 
fifty-two words, thirty important cases involving the most funda¬ 
mental questions of government have been founded. 

The judicial powers of the supreme court are the most 
extensive ever conferred upon or acquired by a tribunal. It 
is the only court in the world that can set aside an act of a 
national legislature. 

“What parliament doth,” said Blackstone, “no power on 
earth can undo.” 

But the supreme court of the United States not only has a 
veto on acts of congress, but hears and settles causes between 
states, and between states and the United States. Of this high 
jurisdiction Toqueville has said: 

“In the nations of Europe the courts of justice are only 
called upon to try the controversies of private individuals, but 
the supreme court of the United States summons sovereign 
powers to its bar.” 

In cases affecting the ambassadors of foreign powers, and 
those to which a state is a party, the supreme court has original 
jurisdiction; but in all others it acts only on appeal. Its appellate 
.lurisdiction extends to all cases arising under the Constitution, 
the laws of the United States and treaties; to causes to which 
the United States is a party; to those between citizens of dif¬ 
ferent states, and between states or citizens and foreign states. 
It passes, on appeal, on any law, state or national, which may 


114 


What of America! 


be challenged as not being in conformity with the Constitution or 
with the laws of the United States, and from its judgment there 
is no appeal. 

Only one original power of the supreme court has been 
withdrawn from it. The judicial power at first extended to cases 
between a state and citizens of another state. This created alarm, 
but the defenders of the Constitution in the battle for ratification 
declared a state could not be sued by a citizen of another state. 
Hamilton in No. 81 of the Federalist, said: ‘Tt is inherent in the 
nature of sovereignty, not to be amendable to the suit of an in¬ 
dividual without its consent.” But when in 1793 a citizen of 
South Carolina sued the state of Georgia (Chisholm vs. Georgia) 
the supreme court took jurisdiction. This case led to the eleventh 
amendment to the Constitution, which declares the judicial power 
shall not extend to such suits. The United States, however, has 
established a court of claims in which it consents to be sued. 

We shall see how the operation of this judicial power tended 
to consolidate the government and infuse the spirit of nationality 
into the union. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


115 


The firmness and independence of the judiciary 
must he regarded as the citadel of the public justice and 
the public security .—Alexander Hamilton, The Federal¬ 
ist, No. LXXVIII. 


XXXIV. 


The Nationalistic Theory of the Federal Judiciary. 

HEN the constitutional convention was debating the 
judiciary plan, with particular reference to the 
manner in which the judges should be appointed. 
Dr. Franklin argued their selection should be left 
to the bar; for, he said, the lawyers would be cer¬ 
tain to choose the ablest of their number in order 
to get rid of them, and thus fall heir to their prac¬ 
tice. 

This entertaining suggestion was not adopted; the appoint¬ 
ment of justices of the supreme court and of judges of the in¬ 
ferior federal courts was vested in the President. There was 
considerable opposition in the convention to a strong judiciary, 
and as its powers remained long in controversy, and are frequent¬ 
ly challenged to this day, we will find it useful to examine its 
history and development. We already have found that the 
American judiciary is an innovation in government. No Euro¬ 
pean nation had development anything like it, and it is no wonder 
that the convention found it startling. In particular the power 
of congress to establish federal courts in the states roused much 
apprehension. Mr. Butler of South Carolina feared that the 
states would revolt at such an encroachment. Even supposing 
such courts would be useful, he advised against the venture. “We 
must,” he said, “follow the example of Solon, who gave the 
Athenians not the best government he could devise, but the best 
they would receive.” 

Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, afterwards appointed chief 
justice, but never confirmed, was for limiting the federal judi¬ 
ciary to a single supreme court, and urged that state federal 
courts, especially if appointed by the President, would be resented 
by the people as an institution of monarchy. Mr. Madison, while 
for a strong judiciary, was for vesting the appointment of judges 
in the senate. Mr. Martin of Maryland foresaw clashes of 
jurisdiction between state and federal courts if the latter were 
instituted. Mr. Randolph of Virginia felt that the state courts 
could not be trusted to enforce the federal laws where they 
came in conflict with the state laws. 















116 


What of America? 


Of late years the question frequently has been raised as 
to whether it was the intent of the framers of the Constitution 
that the supreme court should have the power to set aside acts 
of congress. On this point the debates in the convention throw 
considerable light. In the Virginia plan drawn by Mr. Madison 
and submitted by Mr. Randolph there was provision for a council 
of revision “with authority to examine every act of congress, 
before it shall operate.” This council was to consist of the 
President and “a convenient number of the national judiciary.” 
This plan for a revisionary power to be associated with the 
executive emerged several times but each time was defeated. 
Mr. Madison then proposed that both the President and the 
supreme court should have a veto on acts of congress, Mr. Wilson 
of Pennsylvania urged “that the judiciary ought to have an op¬ 
portunity to remonstrate against encroachments” of the legis¬ 
lative power. Mr. Ellsworth of Connecticut (afterwards chief 
justice), concurred in this view. Mr. Mercer of Maryland “dis¬ 
approved the doctrine that the judges, as expositors of the 
Constitution, should have authority to declare a law void.” Mr. 
Dickinson of Delaware took the same side. Mr. Gorham and Mr. 
Gerry, both of Massachusetts, opposed any mixing of the legis¬ 
lative and judicial powers. Judges, Mr. Gerry said, ought never 
to be legislators. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, felt that 
some check on legislative acts was necessary. There would be 
times, he said, when congress would perforce yield to popular 
demands for emissions of paper money, largesses to the people, 
cancellation of debts and such unwise legislation. He showed that 
English judges, though they could not set aside laws of parlia¬ 
ment, could, as members of that body and of the king’s privy 
council, help make them. 

It was in this debate that Luther Martin of Maryland, an 
able lawyer and afterwards the defender of Aaron Burr in his 
trial for treason, made the statement, “As to the constitutionality 
of laws, that point will come before the judges in their official 
character.” Martin opposed the association of the judges with 
the executive, and afterwards opposed the Constitution itself, be¬ 
cause he thought it did not guarantee the equality of the states. 
Hamilton’s view, as he later dearly indicated in “The Federal¬ 
ist” (No. LXXVIII), was that the jurisdiction of the supreme 
court extended to acts of congress where their repugnancy 
to the Constitution was involved. 

On the vote on Mr. Madison’s motion to give the supreme 
court a veto only three states supported it. Eight voted against 
it. 

But the various propositions to associate the judiciary with 
the executive in a revisionary or veto power, sufficiently indicate 
that the idea of the supreme court checking the power of congress 
was not foreign to the mind of the convention. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 117 

After the supreme court was established the fear of its 
powers did, however, become a consideration in political contro¬ 
versy, and on several occasions congress and the executive have 
sought to put restraints upon it. • The first supreme court con¬ 
sisted of five members. After ten years the number was reduced 
to four. Jefferson, as we shall see, suspended its sittings. In 
1866, congress, to keep President Johnson from filling a vacancy 
on the bench, reduced the number of associate justices. In 1870, 
the court, on which there were two vacancies, declared the legal 
tender act unconstitutional. President Grant thereupon filled 
the vacancies and the full court reversed the previous decision. 

The court always has been firm for its prerogatives. Presi¬ 
dent Washington sought to consult it on laws previous to signing 
them, but the court refused to. express an opinion, holding it 
could act only when a case was before it for judicial decision. 
On the same theory it has frowned on collusive or friendly suits 
brought to settle points of-law, although it is pretty well estab¬ 
lished that the famous case of Peck vs. Fletcher, arising from the 
Georgia land conspiracy and in which Chief Justice Marshall 
fixed the law of fraud and contract, was such a case. In the 
134 years of the supreme court’s existence there have been only 
nine chief justices: John Jay, Oliver Ellsworth, John Marshall, 
Roger B. Taney, Salmon P. Chase, Morrison R. Waite, Melville 
W. Fuller, Edward D. White and William Howard Taft. 


118 


What or America! 


The government of the union is, emphatically and 
truly, a government of the people. In form and sub¬ 
stance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted 
by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and 
for their benefit .—Chief Justice Marshall, opinion in 
McCulloch vs. Maryland. 

XXXV. 


How the Supreme Court Gave Shape to the Government. 

HE man to whom fell the chief task of interpret¬ 
ing the Constitution judicially was John Marshall, 
third chief justice of the United States. He had 
been a soldier in the Revolution and had observed, 
at Washington’s side, the evils of the w^ak gov¬ 
ernment of the old confederation. He emerged 
from the war a strong nationalist, and during his 
long service of thirty-four years as chief justice, sought to find in 
the Constitution the powers necessary to make this a strong na¬ 
tionalist government. 

In this task he relied largely on the implied powers in the 
Constitution. That is, he held that if congress had an un¬ 
doubted power to do a thing it also had the power to employ the 
means to execute it in the most effective way. In one of his 
most famous decisions, that in the case of McCulloch vs. Mary¬ 
land, he illustrated that theory in this way: 

“Take, for example, the power To establish postoffices and 
post roads.’ This power is executed by the single act of making 
the establishment. But, from this has been inferred the power 
and duty of carrying the mail along the post road. * * * 

And from this implied power has again been inferred the right to 
punish those who shall steal letters from the postoffice.” 

The right to punish those who rob the mail, he said, might 
not be indispensably necessary to the establishment of a post- 
office, but, he pointed out, it was “essential to the beneficial ex¬ 
ercise of the power.” 

That was_ the Marshall theory of implied powers, and he 
carried it into all his decisions. In this same decision, asserting 
the powers of the federal government, he said: 

“No trace is to be found in the Constitution of an intention 
to create a dependence of the government of the Union on 
those of the states, for the execution of the great powers assigned 
to it. Its means are adequate to its ends; and on those means 
















Shall This Government Live or Die? 


119 


alone was it expected to rely for the accomplishment of its ends. 
To impose on it the necessity of resorting to means which it can¬ 
not control, which another government may furnish or withhold, 
would render its course precarious, the results of its measures 
uncertain, and create a dependence on other governments, which 
might disappoint its most important designs, and is incompatible 
with the language of the Constitution.’’ 



JOHN MARSHALL, CHIEF JUSTICE FROM 1801 TO 1835, AMERICA’S GREATEST 
JURIST. HE LAID DOWN THE DOCTRINE 'THAT WEBSTER EXPOUNDED AND 
LINCOLN APPLIED, WHICH MADE AMERICA A NATION AND AMERICANS A 
PEOPLE. 

Marshall’s decision in this case, made in 1819, is regarded as 
fundamental in all questions involving conflicts of the federal 
and state power. 

In an earlier and even more famous case Marshall had held 
an act of congress unconstitutional, thus asserting for the first 











120 


What of America? 


time this high prerogative of the supreme court. In Marbury 
vs. Madison (1803) he held that a law of congress not in con¬ 
formity with the Constitution was null and void. 

This decision gave a great shock .to Jefferson and the anti- 
Federalists—the Republicans as they then were called—and 
plans were made to impeach Marshall. But they came to noth¬ 
ing. Marshall’s logic in this decision could not be answered. The 
question was, could “an act of congress repugnant to the Consti¬ 
tution * * * become the law of the land?” If it could, what 

was the use of a Constitution? The instrument itself said: 
“The,. Constitution, and the laws of the United States which 
shall be made in pursuance thereof * * * shall be the su¬ 
preme law nf the land * * *” Laws not made in pursuance 

thereof could not be valid, and the supreme court was the ap¬ 
pointed authority to determine whether statutes conformed to 
the Constitution. If it was found that a statute passed by con¬ 
gress and signed by the President was not in conformity with the 
supreme law of the land, it was the right and the duty of the 
supreme court, when the statute was brought before it, to set it 
aside. 

This decision gave the shape to our government it has 
since retained. Before that the supreme court itself had not 
been highly regarded. John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth, the first 
two chief justices, resigned. Congress had shown a disposition 
to play politics with the court, and its pretensions and dignity 
were not high until Marshall took his seat on it and asserted, 
with extraordinary statesmanship and legal ability, those powers 
that made the United States a nation and the court itself the 
greatest and most respected tribunal in the world. 

To show what small things go to make history, mark those 
two names—McCulloch and Marbury. They were insignificant 
persons, and the causes in which their names appeared were in¬ 
significant. McCulloch was the cashier of the Baltimore branch 
of the United States bank, and because he refused to pay a tax 
laid on the bank by the state of Maryland, his name lives with 
Caesar’s. Marbury’s case originally involved. nothing more im¬ 
portant than the validity of his commission as a justice of the 
peace of the District of Columbia. But that commission had 
been issued under the authority of a judiciary act passed by con¬ 
gress. It being withheld from him by James Madison, then 
secretary of state, Marbury sued to compel its delivery. Long 
after Marbury had ceased to care anything about the job of 
justice of the peace, the case came before the supreme court on 
a sort of side issue, involving the right of the court to issue a 
writ of mandamus. Marshall saw in it a greater issue, and di¬ 
rected his decision to the fundamental involved—the validity of 
an act of congress that was in conflict with a provision of the 
Constitution. Marbury’s name and his justice of the peace job 


Shall This Government Live or Die*? 121 

will always be associated, therefore, with one of the g^reatest and 
most far reaching principles ever laid down by the supreme court 
of the United States. 

If Chief Justice Marshall had not made this decision early, 
it is possible, as Mr. Beveridge reflects in his “Life of Marshall,” 
that such a decision might never have been made. A generation 
was to elapse before the supreme court was again to exercise 
this great prerogative, and that long lapse of time and the want 
of a precedent might easily have operated to restrain the court 
from assuming a power so great. But Marshall saw the neces¬ 
sity of consolidating the government and asserting the principle 
of nationality. In Marbury vs. Madison he laid down the doc¬ 
trine that Webster afterwards expounded with such force. It 
was that the powers of the government, executive, legislative and 
judicial, derived from the people, and not from the states. The 
people granted them to ’be exercised on themselves, and neither 
the power of the states nor the acts of their representatives could 
intervene between the people and the operation of the supreme 
law of the land—that is, of the Constitution. 

Thus was laid the foundation of American nationality. Be¬ 
fore Marshall spoke in Marbury vs. Madison it had not been 
determined whether the powers of the federal government were 
those of a nation or of a league of states. The doctrine that 
Marshall laid down, that Webster expounded and that Lincoln en¬ 
forced, made America a nation and Americans a people. 


122 


What of America? 


Though a wide ocean separates the United States 
from Europe, yet there are various considerations that 
warn us against an excess of confidence or security .— 
Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, No. XXIV. 

XXXVI. 


Adjusting the Balance, Between State and Nation. 


E now have to consider some of the more important 
clauses of the Constitution over which political 
contests have arisen, and whose interpretation by 
the supreme court has developed and extended the 
federal power as we know it today. 

The clause in the Constitution on which par¬ 
ties early divided was that giving congress the 
power ‘‘to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for 
carrying into execution” its express powers. 

Here was a power almost limitless, and its future applica¬ 
tions could not have been foreseen even by the most ardent ad¬ 
vocates of the doctrine of implied powers. For example, congress, 
under another clause, article I, section 8, had specific authority 
to regulate commerce among the states. There were no rail¬ 
roads when the Constitution was written, but when they came 
congress was able to regulate them, because the railroads were 
engaged in commerce among the states, and congress could do 
anything “necessary and proper” to the carrying out of the 
commerce clause. 

The commerce clause itself is one of the great nationalist 
principles of the Constitution. It wiped out the tariffs and 
other commercial restrictions the states had imposed under the 
Articles of Confederation, and gave the federal government a 
long arm in maintaining equality among them. That commerce 
should be free among the states was a first essential to na¬ 
tionality, and without this power to keep it free the federal gov¬ 
ernment would have been helpless before the rivalries of the 
states. 

For example. New York tried to give Robert Fulton a 
monopoly for the operation of steam vessels on the waters of 
that state, and under this grant Fulton’s heirs tried to exclude 
other steam vessels from operating between New York and New 
Jersey. The supreme court held the New York grant was invalid 
as conflicting with the power of congress to regulate commerce 
among the states. 













Shall This Government Live or Die? 123 

That court has held that commerce “comprehends traffic, 
trade, navigation, communication, the transit of persons and the 
transmission of messages by telegraph—indeed, every species of 
commercial intercourse/’ To this commerce clause we owe a 
mass of important legislation designed to “promote the general 
welfare” by protecting the public from manifest evils, such as 
the shipment of impure foods and the distribution of lottery 
tickets. The anti-trust laws also were enacted under this clause, 
and every article of merchandise that goes into interstate com¬ 
merce is thus brought under the regulation of congress; and it 
can readily be seen what an immense power this clause confers 
on the government and to what extent the public’s protection is 
involved in it. 

The express powers of congress are enumerated in the 
Constitution—there are eighteen of them. The first of the 
enumerated powers is the power to lay and collect taxes, but the 
same clause that confers this power specifies the uses to which 
the revenue may be put. There are three only—to pay the na¬ 
tion’s debts, to defend it, and to provide for its general welfare. 

On the point of what constitutes the general welfare, the 
political parties again divided and remain divided to this day. 
The strict constructionists in congress voted steadily against 
the appropriation of money to improve rivers and harbors and 
to build roads. They held these were not national functions, 
but belonged to the states. The other party took the view that 
to facilitate commerce and communication among the states was 
to promote the general welfare. The broader view has latterly 
prevailed, but at first the use of national revenue for internal 
improvements was strongly opposed. A bill for the great national 
highway, known as the Cumberland Road, failed of President 
Monroe’s approval. President Jackson vetoed all internal im¬ 
provement bills that came to him, and declared that the spending 
of public money for “local advantages” was unconstitutional and 
a great evil. 

Although highways and waterways then were the only 
means of binding the expanding nation together in those bonds 
of communication essential to nationality, these strict construc¬ 
tionists could not see how the public welfare was concerned in 
their development. 

The Constitution gives congress the power to declare war 
and to raise and support armies, but the fear of military estab¬ 
lishments which the founders inherited from their English an¬ 
cestors'caused them to limit strictly the time for which an army 
could be provided. The limit is two years, which is the life 
of a congress. Thus no congress can bind a future one to any 
military policy, and the people have a chance at every election to 
say what that policy shall be. And the President, although he is 
commander-in-chief of the army, is powerless to maintain one. 
This balancing of powers, and the limitation placed on military 


124 What of America? 

appropriations, was conceived to check the evils that, in England, 
had been produced by contests for the control, by king and 
parliament. Of the military arm. 

Congress also has power to organize, arm and discipline the 
militia and to call these forces into the service of the nation, but 
the power to appoint militia officers was reserved to the states. 
This reservation is another evidence of the fear that eighteenth 
century statesmen had of the military power. The states wanted 
to keep the militia in their own hands, and they felt that as long 
as they had the appointment of its officers it could not be used 
to destroy local government. 

Experience has proved this reservation of a part of the mili¬ 
tary power to the states to have been a great mistake. It was a 
natural one in view of the fears then existing, but those fears, 
we now know, were groundless; while the harm wrought upon 
our national defense has continued. The system operated to de¬ 
prive the nation’s military establishment of uniformity. It pro¬ 
duced a distinct class of officers differing in training and experi¬ 
ence from those in the regular establishment, and has had a bad 
tendency to cause the state forces to regard themselves as apart 
from those of the nation. The states, moreover, always have 
neglected their militia, and when called into the national service 
these forces have, by reason of their military unpreparedness, 
been found ill adapted to prompt and satisfactory welding with 
the national force. 

The militia, in theory the popular arm, always has been the 
weak link in our defensive system. Dual civil government we 
have made to work. A dual military system is against all mili¬ 
tary precept and experience and never has been made to work. 


Shall This Government Live or Die! 


125 


' ^ An indestructible Union of indestructible states .— 

Chief Justice Chase, opinion in Texas vs. White. 

XXXVII. 


The Limitations on Federal and State Powers. 


UT if there are enumerated powers conferred on 
congress there also are enumerated limitations on 
its powers. It cannot, except in specified cases, 
suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, 
or pass any bill of attainder or ex post facto law. 

It was many centuries after Magna Charta 
that the habeas corpus process became fully effec¬ 
tive in English law. It was recognized but constantly violated by 
arbitrary kings, who committed subjects to prison without bring¬ 
ing charges against them or granting them a trial. In England 
the writ may still be suspended in cases of treason. The Consti¬ 
tution forbids any such suspension except when the public safety 
is threatened by rebellion or invasion. President Lincoln sus¬ 
pended the writ at periods during the Civil War, as a measure 
of public safety. 

Bills of attainder were acts of the English parliament which 
outlawed and^ forfeited the property of persons who could not 
be reached by the courts. The parliament, in such cases, made 
itself a court and punished by legislation, without hearing any 
evidence and without the presence of the accused. The process 
was, of course, repugnant to justice and law. 

An ex post facto law is one that^changes the punishment of 
a crime after the crime is committed, or that defines as a crime 
an act that was not a crime previous to the time it was com¬ 
mitted, or any law that in any way lessens the legal protection 
or makes more difficult the defense of a person on trial. 

These prohibitions the Constitution also imposes on the 
states. 

Most of the states, as we saw, proposed amendments to the 
Constitution at the time they ratified it, and the first congress 
submitted ten amendments, in the nature of a bill of rights, to 
meet these demands. The constitutions of the states all contained 
bills of rights, in the nature of general principles drawn from the 
English constitution. They were so well established the Philadel¬ 
phia convention had not deemed it necessary to repeat them. 

These amendments prohibit the general government from 
infringing the liberties of the people of the states. The general 















126 


What of Amekica! 











>.f 




sV^ 




iL4vaS»3» 







ffs^ 


FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS NOT LICENSE TO INCITE TO VIOLENCE. THE CONSTITU- 
TION DOES NOT PROTECT FREEDOM OF SPEECH. IT MERELY PROHIBITS THE 
FEDERAL POWER FROM ABRIDGING IT AS REGULATED BY THE STATES. THE 
PEOPLE THEMSELVES BY THEIR DISCIPLINE AND PATRIOTIC RESTRAINT 
MUST PRESERVE THIS LIBERTY. 













Shall This Government Live or Die? 127 

government is thus restrained from establishing any religion or 
prohibiting any, abridging freedom of speech or of the press, or 
the right of assembly and petition. They contain the guarantees 
of trial by^ jury, of immunity from unwarranted arrest and 
property seizures, and against unusual punishments. 

These restrictions, however, apply only to the general gov¬ 
ernment. The states are not restrained from making their own 
police regulations governing assembly and speech. When, in the 
Constitutional Convention, Mr. Pinckney and Mr. Gerry moved 
to insert in the section limiting the powers of congress the decla¬ 
ration that “the liberty of the press shall be inviolably preserved,’^ 
Mr. Sherman pointed out that the power of congress did not 
extend to the press. 

The federal government, contrary perhaps to popular belief, 
is not bound by anything in the Constitution to preserve the 
freedom of speech or the liberty of the press. It is bound merely 
to enact no federal law abridging those privileges so far as they 
are guaranteed by the states. It is not bound to protect them 
where they exist, or in the form in which they exist. The consti¬ 
tutional injunction, as respects the federal government, is nega¬ 
tive, not positive. It recites what congress shall not do, not what 
it shall do. 

Freedom of speech and the liberty of the press fall, there¬ 
fore, under the police power of the states. The restrictions 
that power imposes are the full measure of their immunities. 
These rights are not abridged, for example, by the prohibition of 
street speaking likely to cause public commotion, nor by the cen¬ 
soring of moving pictures, nor bv the laws of libel. The law in 
such cases follows the rule of Blackstone; “Every freeman has 
an undoubted right to lay what sentiment he pleases before the 
public * * * but if he publishes what is improper, mischiev¬ 

ous or illegal, he must take the consequences of his own temerity.’^ 

The general government itself can, without violating these 
rights, exclude objectionable literature from the mails. It can 
restrain ill disposed persons from uttering or printing senti¬ 
ments likely to break down the authority of government. In the 
World War an editor was convicted and imprisoned for printing 
statements calculated to impede conscription, and the supreme 
court upheld the action of the trial court. 

In another case affirming a law directed against seditious 
newspapers, the supreme court said: 

“Freedom of the press may protect agitation and criticism 
for modification and repeal of laws, but it does not extend to 
protection of him who counsels and encourages the violation of 
the law as it exists. The Constitution was adopted to preserve 
our government, not to serve as a protecting screen for those 
who, while claiming its privileges, seek to destroy it.” 

The Constitution is careful to safeguard the powers of the 
states and the liberties of the people, but it has another care 


128 


What of’ A m> e r i c a ? 


also, and that is to give the federal government ample means 
for its own preservation, for that is a first essential to its carry¬ 
ing out the purposes for which it was ordained. Let us remem¬ 
ber what those purposes are: “To form a more perfect union, 
establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the com¬ 
mon defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the bless¬ 
ings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.'' 

And what Marshall said of it: “The government of the 
Union then is, emphatically and truly, a government of the peo¬ 
ple. In form and in substance it emanates from the people. Its 
powers are granted by them and are to be exercised directly on 
them and for their benefit." 

And what Webster said of it: “It is the people's Consti¬ 
tution, the people's government; made for the people, made by 
the people, and answerable to the people." 

But the obligation is mutual. If the Constitution protects 
the liberties of the people, the people must protect the Consti¬ 
tution against those who would subvert it for their own pur¬ 
poses. We shall see how the pretensions of sections, privilege and 
class became a threat to the Constitution and to American na¬ 
tionality. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


129 


If, to rid ourselves of the rule of Massachusetts, we 
break the Union, will the evil stop there? Seeing that 
we must have somebody to quarrel with, I had rather 
keep our New England associates for that purpose .— 
Thomas Jefferson. 


XXXVIII. 


How Economic Forces Fostered the Growth of Sectionalism. 

ARSHALL’S decisions, while they consolidated the 
government, did not consolidate the states. Op¬ 
position to centralized power continued in the 
states and became strongest in the South, where 
it was not only denied that the supreme court 
could declare unconstitutional an act of congress, 
but its right to override state laws also was stub¬ 
bornly contested. 

• When Jefferson became President this sentiment, growing 
increasingly sectional, was greatly strengthened; because Jeffer¬ 
son not only was the acknowledged leader of the strict con¬ 
struction party, but also was a personal enemy of Marshall. The 
theory of states' rights, therefore, flourished from the start. The 
Georgia legislature instructed the state courts to pay no at¬ 
tention to the legal constructions or the mandates of the supreme 
court, and when that state was summoned to appear in that court 
in a case in which it had been made a defendant it ignored the 
order. 

If the states could nullify a decision of the supreme court, it 
must follow they could nullify an act of congress, and this claim, 
too, soon was made. In South Carolina the right of congress to 
pass a tariff law inimical to the interests of that state was 
vigorously denied, and the doctrine of nullification began to be 
expounded. This theory was that if a national law seemed to 
conflict with the political or economic interests of a state, the 
state could nullify the law so far as its application to itself was 
concerned. South Carolina pushed this theory to the extremity 
when it called a convention, nullified the tariff laws of 1828 and 
1832 , and notified the state’s intention, if the federal govern¬ 
ment tried to enforce these laws, to withdraw from the Union 
and organize a separate government of its own. 

This doctrine was, of course, incompatible with nationalism 
and in its discussion the country heard the first rumblings of dis¬ 
union. 

It is necessary to remember, however, that the theory em¬ 
bodied in this doctrine was of very early origin, and was a 
















130 


What of America? 


natural growth from the conflicting views that were held respect¬ 
ing the nature of the Constitution. Was it a compact setting up 
a confederacy of sovereign states, or was it the supreme law of 
a nation? Madison, himself a Republican—this party, it must be 











WHICH IS OUR REFUGE 

THE BUILDING U^ og^THER'^WALL^o lHA^CLlsI^ SECTION 


remembered, later called itself Democratic—and the author of 
the Virginia resolutions directed against the Federalist theory 
had argued in “The Federalist” (No. XXXIX), that the Consti¬ 
tution was neither federal nor national, but a mixture of both. 



































Shall This Government Live or Die? 131 

Madison in his old age repudiated the conclusions that the nulli- 
fiers had drawn from the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. 
Jefferson, the author of the Kentucky resolutions, if admitting 
the theory that the Constitution was a compact, at least denied 
the wisdom of its extreme application. 

‘Tf,” he said, “on a temporary superiority of one party, the 
other is to resort to a scission of the Union, no federal govern¬ 
ment can ever exist.’' 

Jefferson’s Kentucky resolutions of 1798, which declared 
that the “States composing the United States of America are not 
united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general 
government,” must be regarded, however, as the fountain head of 
the “compact” doctrine, of which more was to be heard. 

• But the great political and economic issue which was to 
bring this controversy to a head had not yet become threatening. 
When the Constitution was adopted the institution of slavery 
was believed to be in process of extinction. In the Philadelphia 
convention it was agreed that the importation of slaves should 
cease in 1808. The South asked for that much life for the slave 
trade and the North granted it in exchange for the South’s votes 
for the commerce clause. This was one of the many compromises 
by which the Constitution was brought into being. The South 
also asked and obtained the counting of three-fifths of its 
slaves in fixing the basis of congressional representation. This 
was all the stir the slavery question made in the Philadelphia 
convention. Nobody believed the institution would continue to 
grow after the importation of slaves stopped. 

But when westward expansion began and the South developed 
its great cotton industry, which took on an immense new impetus 
from mechanical invention, slave labor grew in importance and 
the South came to look on it as indispensable to its agricultural 
empire. Slavery had died in the North and was prohibited in 
the northwest territory, but there was no prohibition of it else¬ 
where and it followed territorial expansion step by step. Present¬ 
ly a race was on between the North and South to see whether 
new national territory should be free soil or slave soil. 

Thus the great constitutional question came at last to an 
issue. Should nationalism or sectionalism triumph? The germ 
of this controversy had been in th'e Constitution from the be¬ 
ginning; its growth had been checked by innumerable compro¬ 
mises, but it never had been eradicated. 

After seventy-two years the great constitutional compro¬ 
mise broke down, and nationalism and sectionalism faced each 
other in arms. On those battle fields of the Civil War it at 
last was determined that the United States is a nation, that the 
union of the states is indissoluble and that the Constitution is 
strong enough to preserve both the powers of the federal govern¬ 
ment and the liberties of the people. 


132 


What of America? 


The picture of the consequences of disunion cannot 
he too highly colored, or too often exhibited. Every man 
who loves peace; every man who loves his country; 
every man who loves liberty, ought to have it ever before 
his eyes, that he may cherish in his heart a due at¬ 
tachment to the union of America, and be able-to set a 
due value on the means of preserving it. —James Madi¬ 
son, the Federalist, No. XLL 

XXXIX. 


The Decline of Federalism and the Rise of the Jeffersonians. 


E now have to trace some of the steps by which the 
opposing parties on this constitutional question ar¬ 
rived at their momentous confrontation a genera¬ 
tion after the last of the founding fathers was in 
his grave. 

When John Adams came to the presidency in 
1797 the Federalist party, which was the party of 
centralization and broad constitutional construction, seemed des¬ 
tined to remain in undisputed control of the new government. 
Republicanism had received a bad name from the excesses of the 
French revolutionists. Jefferson, its chief, though a man of great 
ability and unquestioned patriotism, was regarded with alarm 
and something like horror by the Federalists, especially in New 
England, where many believed that the Republican doctrines 
he held were incompatible with the existence of ordered govern¬ 
ment and society. Jefferson had spent many years in France 
and was believed to be imbued with French political and philo¬ 
sophical theories. Men whispered that he was an atheist, but 
the same thing was said, and with as little truth, of Benjamin 
Franklin. Neither was an atheist. Jefferson, in the Declaration 
of Independence, had acknowledged an over-ruling Providence 
which is more than the constitutional convention did when ex¬ 
horted to it by no other than Franklin himself. 

But what was clear was, that Jefferson had said that a revo¬ 
lution every twenty years would be a desirable thing. The 
effect of a declaration like that on the ‘Vell-borns’’ who had 
stood up in the constitutional convention and opposed popular suf¬ 
frage through fear of democracy may be imagined. 

Federalism, therefore, which had become intrenched in the 
eight years of Washington’s administration, appeared impregnable 
when the Virginia Federalism of Washington was turned into 
















Shall This Government Live or Die? 



THOMAS JEFFERSON. 


the Massachusetts Federalism of John Adams. But never were 
political appearances more deceitful. Within a year after Adams 
became President his party had begun to pass behind a cloud from 
which, it never was to emerge. That the Republicans gave the 
Adams administration great provocation there is no doubt, but 
the sedition act by which it sought to crush out this opposition 







134 


What of America? 


was one of the greatest political blunders a party ever has com¬ 
mitted. Hamilton himself warned against it. The sedition law, 
he said, would only give body and solidity to the Republicans. 
‘Tf there be a man in the world I ought to hate,” Hamilton 
said on a subsequent occasion, “it is Jefferson.” Saying that he 
courageously advised the Federalists to vote for Jefferson to 
break the presidential deadlock when the election of 1800 was 
thrown into the house. He spoke as a patriot, believing Burr to 
be a dangerous man. 

Hamilton’s warning was unheeded; the sedition act was 
passed and rigorously enforced. Under it the printing of any¬ 
thing against congress or the President, with intent “to bring 
them into contempt or disrepute,” was made a misdemeanor 
punishable with heavy fine and imprisonment. Mathew Lyon, a 
Vermont member of congress, had referred in a political speech 
to the “ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice” 
of the Adams administration. For this he was fined $1,000 
and sentenced to four months in prison. Republican editors 
who came to Lyon’s defense were convicted and punished with 
the same rigor. Nor were the Federalists fortunate in the judge 
who presided over many of these trials for sedition. Samuel 
Chase, associate justice of the supreme court, was an able judge 
but a strong partisan. His arbitrary rulings and conduct on the 
bench gave the Republicans the opportunity to call him the 
American Jeffreys. It was this judge whom Jefferson and his 
party later tried to impeach, though their real aim was John 
Marshall. The senate, however, failed to convict. 

The sedition prosecutions were skilfully capitalized by the 
Republicans. Lyon was re-elected to congress while in prison, 
and in 1798 Jefferson who was directing the attack, pressed it 
home by writing the resolutions which the Kentucky legislature 
adopted and which became the accepted doctrine of the party 
that was to govern the nation for many years. The resolutions 
were strong and‘ably written, as was everything that came from 
Jefferson’s pen. After setting forth the compact theory of the 
Constitution, they conclude with some general reasoning and ap¬ 
plications which ought to be familiar to all who would understand 
the course of political history in the United States. These con¬ 
clusions may be concisely noted: 

To take from the states all the powers of self-government, 
and transfer them to a general and consolidated government, 
is not for the peace, happiness or prosperity of these states. 

Kentucky is determined to submit tamely to unlimited power 
in no men or body of men on earth. 

That usurpation of power by the federal government, unless 
arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive states into revolution. 

That such resistance will furnish new pretexts to those who 
would have it believed that men cannot be governed except by a 
rod of iron. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 135 

That free government must be founded on jealousy of power, 
not on confidence in men. 

That men to whom authority is delegated must be bound 
down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. 

That all acts done by delegated authority in contravention 
of the compact theory of the Constitution may be declared null 
and void by the states. 

Thus early in our political history was the constitutional is¬ 
sue of states’ rights and federal powers emphatically joined. It 
is important to note this issue, because long after events had 
settled the contest in favor of the federal powers, new forces, 
unknown to the Constitution, rose in America and renewed, on 
their own behalf, the challenge the states had not been able to 
make good. 


136 


What of America? 


The Constitution does not contain the absurdity of 
giving one power to make laws and another power to 
resist them. —Andrew Jackson. 

We won’t go out of the Union, and you shall not !— 
Abraham Lincoln, speech at Bloomington, Ill., in 1856. 

XL. 


Defeated Federalism Takes Refuge in Sectionalism. 


HE ship of state, Jefferson announced when he be¬ 
came President, was to be put upon the Republi¬ 
can tack. There alone could she show her true 
motion and the handiwork of her builders. De¬ 
feated and discredited Federalism retreated to its 
stronghold of New England—and also, as Jeffer¬ 
son complained, into that of the judiciary; for the 
Federalists had appointed all the federal judges, including John 
Marshall, the chief justice. In that stronghold, Jefferson warned 
his party, the remains of Federalism were to be fed from the 
treasury. 

The contest that ensued for the possession of this stronghold, 
and that finally took on the character of a personal struggle be¬ 
tween Jefferson and Marshall, will now illustrate for us the 
fierceness of the spirit that marked the birth of parties in the 
new nation. The Adams administration, the Republicans charged, 
had sat up nights creating sixteen new federal judgeships so the 
retiring Federalist President could fill the judiciary with his 
appointees. President Jefferson’s congress now repealed these 
acts and thus legislated these “midnight judges” out of office; 
the repealing act even went to the length of suspending the sit¬ 
tings of the supreme court for more than a year to keep Marshall 
from declaring the act unconstitutional. How Marshall retorted 
to this challenge in his famous decision in Marbury vs. Madison, 
we .have seen. 

Jefferson might lash out at the supreme court as he would, 
calling it an agency “ever acting with noiseless feet, gaining 
ground step by step, and engulfing insidiously the state govern¬ 
ments,” but victory remained with the judiciary; and the Presi¬ 
dent was forced to turn to other departments of the government 
to impress the marks of Republicanism. This he did by reducing 
the army to twenty-five hundred men, which, in Jeffersonian 
language, was known as a “chaste reformation” of Federalist 
militarism. The Federalist navy was virtually junked, and the 















Shall, This Government Live or Die? 


137 





lAN'^ 
f ]R.C ^ 




I 

sfAr£' 




TWTT prorTEM of early AMERICAN STATESMANSHIP WAS THE WELDING OF 
THE problem of LAKi^y ^ nation, a work made difficult 

no^^only by apparently conflicting interests but by the bitter. 

NESS OF PARTY STRIFE. 


















138 


What of Am, erica? 


few ships of war that were retained the President wished to 
have tied up in a Virginia creek, ‘‘where it would require but 
one set of plunderers to watch them/’ Republicanism then set 
about removing taxes, including that on whisky, which had been 
felt to be a great evil in an age when whisky formed an article 
of diet. Thus was Republicanism, or “mobocracy,” as Federalism 
termed it, encouraged and strengthened in the country; its many 
sided leader who could converse in four langauges, play the 
violin, perform a surgical operation, dance the minuet, draw the 
plans of a building, make an astronomical calculation and break 
a horse to the saddle, setting the Republican fashion meanwhile 
by wearing yarn stockings and slippers down at the heels. 

Party had now got the start of nationality, a grave cir¬ 
cumstance and one that was to bring a train of multiplying evils 
upon the young republic. If Republican nullification spoke in the 
Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. Federalist nullification now 
was to speak in the action of some of the leaders of eastern 
opinion. New England fears of Republicanism had been 
brought to a head by Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana terri¬ 
tory. It was felt that this vast southern and western empire 
would surely throw the old adjustment out of balance and by 
draining New England of population and capital, leave the 
older states in a hopeless minority. Embittered Federalism 
turned, therefore, to a scheme of separation from the union into 
which it was hoped to carry New England, New York and New 
Jersey. Its moving spirit was Timothy Pickering, a Massachusetts 
senator. The plan was to detach as many northern and eastern 
states as possible and invite Canada and Nova Scotia to join 
them in setting up a new federal union in which the Federalist 
party would have a monopoly of government. The Federalists as 
a party never were committed to this scheme of disunion, though 
its leaders were aware of it. The Adamses, Hamilton, Burr and 
others were approached. Hamilton had been picked for military 
command by the ambitious plotters, but they received no counte¬ 
nance from any who could speak for the Federalist party. But the 
design illustrates how precariously the roots of nationality held 
in the new soil of America. State attachments, as Gouverneur 
Morris had said in the Constitutional convention, were serpents’ 
teeth. To state attachments now were added party rancors, 
personal hatreds, jealousy of power. Of these warring interests 
unity and nationality were the victims. On the one hand was Re¬ 
publicanism holding that the Constitution was a compact between 
sovereign states which had retained the power to annul it, and 
on the other was Federalism holding not only that centralized 
government was a necessity of the Union’s design, but that gov¬ 
ernment itself was the business of the elect upon which Jacob¬ 
inical democracy might not enter. 

In this contest neither party rested upon the necessity of 
nationality. Neither was national in purpose or vision. The 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 139' 

constitution was a compromise, and parties interpreted it to 
party advantage. The necessities of politics were the first con¬ 
sideration. Hamilton, confessing the irregularity of the pro¬ 
ceeding, proposes to the governor of New York a plan to deprive 
Burr of electoral votes; Burr intrigues with the British minister 
to detach western states from the Union; Republicanism repudi¬ 
ates national laws. Federalism plots secession; Burr shoots Ham¬ 
ilton and Jefferson threatens Marshall with impeachment. If 
Jefferson could say, in a moment of conciliation, “We are all Re¬ 
publicans, we are all Federalists,” it might have been said with 
more truth that neither yet were Americans. 


140 


What of America? 


Until the people have, by some solemn and authori¬ 
tative act, annulled or changed the established form, it 
is binding upon themselves collectively, as well as in¬ 
dividually; and no presumption, or even knowledge of 
their sentiments, can warrant their representatives in a 
departure from it, prior to such an act. —Alexander 
Hamilton, The Federalist, No. LXXVIIL 

XLL 


Federalism’s Last Stand in the Hartford Convention. 

ATHANIEL GORHAM of Massachusetts expressed 
the fear in the constitutional convention that it 
would be the unequal size of the states that would 
prove the obstacle to the successful working of the 
federal system. He made the novel proposal that 
the large states should be cut up in a manner to 
make all as nearly as possible of equal size. 

But experience soon showed the danger to the Constitution 
was not in a tendency of the larger states to encroach on the 
smaller ones, but in the tendency of states, whether large or 
small, to combine against the general government. 

Combinations made for sectionalism, and sectionalism was 
destined to prove the greatest enemy to nationalism this country 
was to know. There can be only one greater enemy to national¬ 
ism, and that is classism. 

From the beginning of the government down to the Civil 
War it was the combinations of states with interests they con¬ 
ceived to be apart from others that retarded the growth of na¬ 
tionality and threatened the perpetuity of the Union. 

Jefferson’s embargo act of 1807, conceived as a retaliatory 
measure against Britain and France, which now were at war 
and preying on our shipping, was a heavy blow to New Eng¬ 
land com^merce. In those days as in these men wanted to make 
money out of war, and they were ready to submit to any national 
humiliation to make it. They didn’t care how much the bellig¬ 
erents interfered with our rights upon the sea. What the New 
England shippers wanted was to sell cargoes abroad, and they 
preferred the risk of capture to American ships to the greater 
risk of defending them with the national arm. 

This nation now has learned that the way to protect our 
commerce and maintain our rights upon the seas, is not to 
keep our ships in port, but to maintain a navy able to punish any 
power that dares to interfere with them. 
















Shall This Government Live or Die? 


141 













"OLD IRONSIDES” WOULD HAVE HAD DIFFICULTY IN DEFEATING AND DE¬ 
STROYING THE GUERRIERE IF SECTIONALISM HAD RIVEN HER AND DIVIDED 
HER CREW OF FIGHTERS. AS IT THEN WAS DIVIDING THE STATES AND 
RENDING THE CONSTITUTION. 


















142 What of Am, erica! 

Aside from that lesson the wisdom of the embargo measure 
need not concern us any more than that of the tariff act of 1828 
against which South Carolina passed its nullification law; but as 
against showing the sectionalism of the country and its total 
lack of national mindedness, we have to record the action taken 
in New England as a result of the embargo and of the second 
war with Britain of which it was the precursor. 

The New England states, injured in a local interest, com¬ 
bined, because narrowly sectional and in their opposition to the 
administration were hurried to the verge of disunion. The “Essex 
Junta,” so-called from the name of the Massachusetts county in 
which Pickering lived, took the lead in this combination. The 
junta was believed to be the head and front of the Federalist 
irreconcilables who were known as the British faction. When 
Jefferson was elected the Republicans had sung: 

The Federalists are down at last. 

The Monarchists completely cast. 

The Aristocrats are stripped of power. 

Storms o’er the British faction lower. 

Soon we Republicans shall see 
Columbia’s sons from bondage free. 

Lord, how the Federalists will stare— 

A Jefferson in Adams’s chair! 

In 1808 the Massachusetts legislature committed the political 
sabotage of adjourning without providing for the choice of presi¬ 
dential electors. A year later this body resolved that national 
laws to. enforce the embargo were not legally binding on that 
state. Senator Pickering declared the states must judge for 
themselves what acts of the general government were “usurpa¬ 
tions” to be negatived by the legislature. This was, in effect, 
the language of the Kentucky resolutions. In Connecticut, Gov¬ 
ernor Trumbull sent a message to the legislature recommending 
action to protect the people of that state against the “assumed 
powers” of the general government. 

When the Madison administration was forced into war with 
Britain this New England sectionalism maintained its front. 
Those states refused to place their militia under the federal au¬ 
thority or to allow them to pass beyond the state boundaries. 
When, for such refusal, a prosecution for treason was proposed 
in congress against the governor of Vermont, the legislature of 
Massachusetts came to his support. In Connecticut an expedition 
of Decatur against a British blockading squadron at New London 
was frustrated by mysterious blue signal lights, flashed at points 
on the coast, giving the enemy warning. Their origin never was 
ascertained, but the name “Blue Light Federalists” long clung 
to the party in that state. When James Lawrence, the gallant 
commander of the Chesapeake, was killed in the action with the 
Shannon, Massachusetts refused him funeral honors, and a com¬ 
mittee of the legislature adopted a resolution condemning the 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


143 


war and declaring “it was not becoming a moral and religious 
people to express any approbation of military and naval exploits 
not immediately connected with the defense of our sea coast and 
soil.’^ 

New England sectionalism led inevitably to the Hartford 
convention. This gathering, called by the Massachusetts legis¬ 
lature, numbered delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, 
Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont, It sat three weeks 
in the "winter of 1814-15, and deliberated in secret. When it 
adjourned it was with the expectation of reassembling, but events 
ended any hopes these early nullifiers may have had of a New 
England confederacy. 

In this secret Sanhedrin of federalism, American nationalism 
was quietly smothered under a bolster of constitutional interpre¬ 
tation. The states were to have their own armies and their own 
say as to when and for what purposes they should be used. 
The general government was to be deprived of all power to draft 
citizens for military service. The power of congress to declare 
war was to be restricted. The commerce clause of the Constitu¬ 
tion was to become a dead letter. No new states were to be ad¬ 
mitted unless New England liked their looks. 

George Cabot was the chief delegate of Massachusetts to this 
convention, and on him and the convention itself indignant John 
Adams, in the name of whose party these proceedings were taken, 
probably pronounced correct judgment when he exclaimed, 
“Thank God! George Cabot’s close buttoned ambition has broken 
out at last; he wants to be President of New England, sir!” 

New England federalism made its last stand in the Hart¬ 
ford convention, and from that intrenchment it was blown 
out by the blast of Andrew Jackson’s guns at New Orleans. 


144 


What of Am. erica? 


Experience, which is the best criterion to work by, 
so fully, clearly and decisively reprobates the practice of 
trusting to militia, that no man who regards order, 
regularity and economy, or who has any regard for his 
own honor, character or peace of mind, will risk them 
upon this issue. —Washington's warning against military 
unpreparedness. 

XLII. 


The Result of Unpreparedness in the War of 1812. 

HE second war with Britain concerns us from a na¬ 
tionalist viewpoint because its conduct demonstrat¬ 
ed that people and government had learned noth¬ 
ing from the experience of the War of the Revolu¬ 
tion or from the warnings of Washington on the 
necessity of military preparedness. 

After the Revolution the army had been al¬ 
lowed to dwindle to the merest skeleton of a military organiza¬ 
tion, and early in Washington’s administration congress fixed its 
strength at 258 officers and 5,156 men. During the French war 
scare of 1799 the army was increased to 51,000 officers and men, 
but the next year it was reduced to a little more than four 
thousand. Jefferson, as we have seen, virtually abolished the 
military and naval establishments, but just previous to the incom¬ 
ing of the Madison administration congress authorized a force 
of approximately nine thousand officers and men.. Despite the 
imminence of war, however, this force was not kept up; and when 
hostilities were suddenly declared in June, 1812, the regular 
establishment numbered only 6,700 effectives. The Republicans 
were for a land war and the conquest of Canada, and gave little 
attention to naval requirements; partly because Britain was 
popularly supposed to be invincible at sea, and partly, it was 
charged, because it was feared a naval war might redound 
to the glory of the Federalist maritime states of New England. 

The advance on Canada, therefore, fell to untrained militia 
and enthusiastic but unequipped volunteers, with results that 
might have been foreseen. Governor Hull of the territory of 
Michigan, with no more military capacity than the bestowal of 
a brigadier-general’s commission could give him, crossed into 
Canada, but being speedily outgeneraled retreated with his force 
of 2,200 men and allowed himself to be shut up in Detroit, which 
place he presently surrendered to an inferior force of British 
and Indians without firing a shot. 

An expedition of militia sent out from Indiana under Gen¬ 
eral Hopkins and another under General William Henry Harri- 
















Shall This Go\hirnment Live or Die? 


145 



son, were halted by the open mutiny of the troops, who refused 
to proceed after a few days’ march and cooly took their several 
• ways home. The New York militia under General Van Rens¬ 
selaer refused to cross into Canada to the support of an American 
force that already had crossed and captured the enemy’s posi¬ 
tion at Queenstown. General Dearborn, instructed to strike at 
Montreal, was halted at the Canadian boundary when 3,000 of his 
mliitia declined to set a foot on the other side of the line. During 


THE YOUNG NATION FORGOT WASHINGTON’S WARNING AND RELIED ON AN 
UNTRAINED MILITIA WHICH FAILED. THE ENEMY CAPTURED THE SEAT OF 
GOVERNMENT AND BURNED THE NEW CAPITOL. THE PICTURE OF ITS RUINS 
SHOULD FOREVER BE A LESSON TO AMERICANS IN THE FOLLY OF MILITARY 
UNPREPAREDNESS. 

the year 1812 no fewer than 65,000 militia and volunteers were 
called into the service to conquer a country defended by no more 
than 4,500 British regulars with no results whatever. 

While the government was thus experimenting with a 
militia army that was better informed on the point of its legal 
rights than in military science, the navy, manned by sailors who 
knew their business, was making the flag of the republic terrible 
at sea. The American navy, fortunately, never has been manned 
or commanded by volunteers from law office, store or political 
stump. 

Of the campaign of 1813 in which two American expeditions 
for the conquest of Canada were thrown back by a force of 









146 


What of America? 


only two thousand British, the conclusion of General Emory 
Upton in his “Military Policy of the United States,” may be 
cited as revealing the true cause of its humiliating failures. He 
says: “The campaign affords the most satisfactory demonstra¬ 
tion of the great importance of, once and for all, doing away with 
a military system which, as under the Confederation, still based 
itself upon the support and co-operation of the states.” 

In 1814 the British, who had had a fleet in the Chesapeake 
for a year without stirring the government to any measures for 
defense of the capital, landed a force and marched on Washington. 
The government called hastily on the militia and a force of fifty- 
four hundred men, including only six hundred regulars, were as¬ 
sembled. Without organization and under officers as raw as the 
men this force met the British at Bladensburg, Md., and was 
chased off the field by the enemy, who numbered less than 
fifteen hundred. The American militia didn’t fight; they ran, 
as is attested by the fact that they lost only eight killed and 
eleven wounded. 

Even Jefferson, the arch foe of military establishments, 
wrote in his retirement: “I fear we are to expect reverses until 
we can find out who are qualified for command, and until these 
can learn their profession.” 

Unfortunately, however, war does not wait for military 
officers to learn their profession or for raw militia to become 
trained and disciplined. The weakness in our system of national 
defense is traceable, in this respect, as General Upton says, to the 
defective theory which the Constitution took over from the old 
colonial confederation. The militia was left to be officered by 
the states. Under those conditions it never was, and cannot be, 
a national force. Yet nothing has been more clearly demonstrated 
in the history of our wars than that only a national army, uni¬ 
formly trained, equipped and officered can be a reliable national 
defense. Such an army can be trained in time of peace. It can 
be infused with the national spirit. The militia is regarded only 
as a state force; it was so regarded by Governor Chittenden 
when in a critical period of the war he ordered the Vermont 
militia home to defend the soil of their own state. 

In the second war with Britain the United States called 
527,654 men into service, of which 458,463 were militia, to op¬ 
pose an enemy who at no time had to exceed 67,000 troops in the 
field. On the military organization and training of the Ameri¬ 
can force comment, in the face of these figures, is superfluous. 

Our dual military system has been one of the great 
obstacles to American nationality. That obstacle can oniy be 
overcome when every citizen shall regard himself as a unit of the 
national defense; when he shall be trained by the nation, armed 
by the nation and commanded by the nation, as a part of the 
nation’s military arm, and of that arm only. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


147 


There are no Alleghenies in my politics .—Daniel 
Webster. 


XLIII. 


The Kffects of Continental Kxpansion on Nationalism. 



HE rapid expansion' in territory and population 
that proceeded during the first half of the last 
century, while it struck the imagination and 
gratified the pride of Americans, was to prove 
yet another challenge to their nationalism. 
Would a system devised for three million col¬ 
onists, virtually of one race and inhabiting a 
coast line, prove workable when applied to a continent peopled 
by a mixture of races of diverse social and political tradi¬ 
tions, separated by great distances and with conflicting eco¬ 
nomic interests? 

We have seen the fears of the New England states that 
westward expansion would deprive the East of population, 
wealth and political weight in the government. Nor were 
these fears groundless. The settlement of the western lands 
had both a political and economic effect in the East. Politi¬ 
cally it ended the Virginia and Massachusetts dynasties, and 
its economic effect was to send wages up in the East by draw¬ 
ing away its labor supply, a result that turned the East to the 
theory of the protective tariff. Webster’s reply to Hayne, 
w’hich was a high and sounding note of nationalism, was indi¬ 
rectly a protective tariff speech, since it was called forth by 
South Carolina’s protest against that policy. Yet, Webster 
had been, all his life, a free trader. The change in his atti¬ 
tude on this question is merely a reflection of the great eco¬ 
nomic revolution that had taken place with the development 
of the West. 


This political and economic revolution, whose processes, 
as tve have seen, involved the expansion of the slave power, 
was to supply the great and final test which American nation¬ 
alism had to meet. The aged Jefferson wrote, when the Mis¬ 
souri question suddenly presented itself to a startled nation, 
that never in the darkest hour of the Revolution had he so 
feared for the, country’s future. The new and tremendous 
forces generated by expansion had engulfed the old parties 
of the early period. The Federalists disappeared, and in their 
place rose the Whigs. The Republican party, grown un¬ 
wieldy, broke in pieces and re-emerged as the Democratic 
party, a southern party now, holding to states’ rights and 
presently to the institution of slavery. More and more this 












148 


What of America? 


political division became a sectional one and under the politi¬ 
cal aspect of sectionalism was its economic import. Thus 
doubly armed, sectionalism’s challenge to nationality grew 
steadily more menacing. 





COMMUNICATION, TRANSPORTATION, THE EXCHANGE OF THOUGHT AND COM¬ 
MODITIES WERE THE LINKS THAT BOUND THE EXPANDING NATION TO¬ 
GETHER WHEN DISTANCE, SECTIONALISM AND CONFLICTING INTERESTS 
WERE OPERATING TO DISINTEGRATE IT. NATIONALISM ALWAYS MUST DE¬ 
MAND THAT THESE AVENUES OP EXCHANGE BE KEPT OPEN. 


What held continental America together during the 
growth of these separatist processes? Two great cohesive 
forces. One, the genius of America’s western pioneers for 
free government; the other, the development of the means of 
communication and transportation. 

The pioneers who settled the West merely repeated the 
processes that had attended the settlement of the East by 
their ancestors. In the Mississippi Valley the institutions that 




























































































149 


Shall This Government Live or Die! 

were planted were cuttings from the same roots that had been 
planted in New England and Virginia. If “westward the 
course of empire,” westward, also, the course of Americans’ 
political education. They carved wilderness commonwealths 
in the West on the model of those in the East, and brought 
to their government the same political ideas that had made 
the colonial system work. Americans, however far they 
pressed on their westward march, would have, first of all, 
local government. Americans will have local government to¬ 
day, even if it be bad government, as witness the government 
of their cities. Here, then, in this homogeneity of American 
political institutions and in the common political education of 
the Americans who had learned to make them work, was the 
first cohesive force that operated against the effects of sec¬ 
tionalism. ' ! 

The second force was no less powerful. Indeed, it may 
be doubted if the first would have sufficed, in the end, with¬ 
out the other. Even in the old thirteen states we noted the 
detachment, the suspicion and fear that were the results of 
lack of means of communication among them. How much 
more potent for disunion must these causes have been when 
America became continental, had those means still been lack¬ 
ing? But just at the time when expansion attained its 
greatest impetus, the railroad came. Not only did it supply 
quicker and cheaper transportation, but, what is more im¬ 
portant, communication and exchange of thought. The first 
requisite for nationality is a national mind. Americans must 
think nationally if they are to act nationally. A nationally 
minded America must be an America in which there are no 
obstructions to the full and free interchange of thought. That 
v/ill hold people together and keep them neighbors, no matter 
how far apart they may dwell, more effectively than any 
other known agency. The coming of the railroad gave Amer¬ 
ica this agency. 

It seems a far cry from railroads to literature, but if 
we will stop to think we will see that it was this agency of trans¬ 
portation and communication that gave America a national 
literature. It disseminated thought and information through 
books and newspapers. It enabled the inhabitants of the scat¬ 
tered settlements ip the new territories to know what the 
people of the older states were thinking about and doing. It 
ended isolation and provincialism. Thereafter, on this con¬ 
tinent, there could be no migration of Americans anywhere 
that would sever them from the national thought and the na¬ 
tional life. 

With the coming of the railroad the mountain ranges, 
the ocean bays and the vast rivers that Dean Tucker had 
talked about as forming the boundaries that would split 
America up into petty, independent and clashing sovereignties, 
were barriers charmed away. 


150 


What of America? 


It is, sir, the people's Constitution, the people's 
government; made for the people, made by the people, 
and answerable to the people. —Daniel Webster, reply 
to Hayne. 

John Marshall has made the decision; now let him 
execute it. —Andrew Jackson. 

XLIV. 


The Nullifying Doctrine of Class Rights. 


HEN South Carolina raised the banner of state 
nullification, it required only one of the least 
rhetorical of the passages in Mr. Webster’s cele¬ 
brated reply to Mr. Hayne to shiver that doc¬ 
trine in pieces. The government, he said, was 
not of the states, but of the people. “I hold it,” 
he said, “to be a popular government, erected by 
the people, those who administer it responsible to the people, 
and itself capable of being amended and modified, just as 
the people may choose it should be.” 

In these words he merely paraphrased the language of 
the Constitution itself. “We, the people of the United States,” 
that document begins. This is not, then, a government of the 
states nor of sections; and that being so, how much less 
is it a government of special interests, of groups or of class? 
In these days the pretense is boldly advanced on many sides 
that the government is the agency of some one part of the 
people. This is merely a new form of nullification, an attempt 
to nullify the Constitution except as it may advantageously 
apply to the interests of some part of the people less than the 
whole. But we do not find anything in the Constitution pro¬ 
viding that legislation should be controlled by or in the in¬ 
terests of any particular class. There are those who would 
change the Constitution to read, “We, the people of the 
United States, engaged in this or that occupation or business.” 
But the manufacturers are not the people of the United 
States, the producers are not, the politicians, merchants, 
workers are not. • Whenever we see one of these or any other 
classes organizing and combining for their own interests, as 
opposed to the general or public interest, we may think of 
them as nullifiers of the Constitution exactly as were those 
who advanced the doctrine in Kentucky in 1798 and in New 
England in 1814 and in South Carolina in Webster’s day—the 















Shall This Government Live or Die? 


151 



IF THE SO-CALLED SOVEREIGN STATES COULD NOT MAKE THEIR DOCTRINE OF 
NULLIFICATION STICK, THE PRETENSIONS OF CLASSES AND SPECIAL IN¬ 
TEREST GROUPS MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO CHALLENGE AMERICAN NA¬ 
TIONALITY. 
















































































152 


What of America? 


doctrine that the Constitution and laws of the United States 
are not binding except as we are pleased to be bound by them. 

The nullifiers of the Calhoun school spoke in the name of 
a state, but the nullifiers of our day raise the voice of class, a 
voice more arrogant and dangerous. Even secession spoke in 
the name of the states, and had, it may be, some constitutional 
warrant for it. The Southerners could at least show that 
slavery was in the Constitution (though the word itself does 
not occur there), but where can it be shown in the Constitu¬ 
tion that the interests now forming blocs in congress and the 
country have any constitutional rights above those of all the 
people? 

If the South would have broken the union over slavery, 
there are special interests in the country today that would 
break it over their peculiar privileges. These interests, if they 
could have their way, would sovietize the United States, for 
every special interest is nothing but a soviet, and soviet rule 
is the most extreme form of class rule the world ever has seen. 
Blocs are soviet germs; they would govern for themselves and 
in their own interest; instead of a clash of state interests such 
as we had in our early history under the Articles of Confed¬ 
eration, we would have clashes of soviet interests, a far more 
dangerous alignment than ever states or sections offered. 

If the construction that Webster and Marshall placed on 
the Constitution denied the pretension of a sovereign state to 
override the power of the general government, exercised in 
the interests of all the states, what would they have said to 
the pretension of a single class of citizens, not even named 
in the Constitution, to override that power in its own interests? 

The issues of the Civil War determined that the states 
were not sovereign in the sense that they could, by individual 
or collective action, withdrawn from the union and reassume 
any sovereign powers they were supposed to have when they 
entered it. If the states are not above the Constitution can any 
combination of citizens be? 

“Whence,” asked Webster, in his reply to Hayne, “is 
this supposed right of the states derived?” 

Whence, it may now be asked in the same language, is 
this supposed right of interests that do not embrace the in¬ 
terests of all the people derived? 

“There is,” said Webster, “no authority with them (the 
states) to arrest the operation of a law of congress.” 

There is no authority with a combination of citizens to 
deny to other citizens any right enjoyed under the Constitu¬ 
tion, and the laws. 

“The states,” said Webster, “cannot make war; they can¬ 
not contract alliances; they cannot make, each for itself, 
separate regulations of commerce.” 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 153 

If the states were denied these prerogatives of sov¬ 
ereignty, shall they be granted to a combination of citizens? 
Shall a class make war when states cannot? Shall classes 
contract alliances? Shall they mak^, each for itself, separate 
regulations of commerce? 

A class has made war in this country. It has taken arms 
in its hands and shot down those who refused to bow to its 
dictates. Classes have contracted alliances to impose their will 
on others. Classes have, by violently interfering with the 
production and distribution of the necessaries of life, sought 
to make their own regulations of commerce. 

These are the new nullifiers of the Constitution and the laws. 
They are trying to do what state nullifiers and state seces¬ 
sionists never succeeded in doing. Nullification met its Mar¬ 
shall, its Jackson and its Webster. Secession met its Lincoln. 
Is there another such American today who will meet with 
equal patriotism and courage the challenge to free government 
that class and privilege have thrown down? 


154 


What of America? 


A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of 
the government; a feeble execution is but another phrase 
for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, 
whatever it may be in theory, must be in practice, a bad 
government. —Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist,” 
No. LXX. 

XLV. 


Why the Federal Powers Have Grown and Those of the States Declined. 



HE leaders of the early Federalist party were men 
of high patriotism, exceptional ability, and pure 
characters, but it has been said of them that they 
were terribly afraid lest the country should not 
be sufficiently governed. 

This question of how much government is 
enough never has been settled to the satisfaction 
of everybody. It still is debated and probably always will be. 
We have seen what the Jeffersonian Republicans held on this 
point and where the Hamiltonian Federalists stood. We now 
have to trace the results of the successive compromises to 
which their respective theories have been subjected, and to 
see where they have led us in practice. 

The first thing that must be plain to us on the slightest 
examination of our political history is that the federal power 
has steadily grown, while that of the states has greatly de¬ 
clined. If the federal as opposed to the national theory had 
I’etained its original force, this condition would be regarded as 
a great evil. It is doubtless true that local government, in 
theory, is more likely to be under the control of the governed 
than that which governs them from a distance. But it has 
been a steadily revealed weakness of the original theory of 
the state governments that they neglect or refuse to exercise 
their powers. We know that if a man does not use or exer¬ 
cise his arm it will in time lose its muscular power, and be¬ 
come useless to him. It is so with the functions of govern¬ 
ment. Broadly, the reason why power has passed from the 
states, and been assumed by the federal government, is be¬ 
cause the states have failed to exercise it, and the people have 
been forced to turn more and more to the government at 
Washington. 

Now, under our system it is apparent that laws in the 
states ought to be as nearly as possible uniform, especially 













Shall This Government Live or Die? 


155 



STATE 

LE6I5LATI0N 




THE REASON THE FEDERAL POWERS HAVE GROWN WHILE THOSE OF THE 
STATES HAVE DECLINED IS BECAUSE THE PEOPLE HAVE HAD TO TURN TO 
CONGRESS FOR THE LEGISLATION THE STATES HAVE DENIED THEM. 



























156 


What of America! 


laws relating to business and industry. This was recognized 
in the constitutional convention, and it was provided that con¬ 
gress should have power to enact national bankruptcy laws. 
If the states were equally alert to the necessities of the public 
welfare and would pass laws uniform in character, it would 
not be necessary to have so much national legislation. But 
their governments are not equal in this respect. Some may 
provide necessary legislation while others refuse to do so, and 
this makes for inequality and injustice in an age when the 
products of industry no longer are confined to the states 
where they originate, but are transported to markets in all 
the states. 

Let us take an example of an inequality of law resulting 
from conflicting state legislation. It is clearly within the 
competency of states to make laws regulating child labor. 
The necessity of such regulation is recognized. It is de¬ 
manded by the public welfare. Some of the states have 
made such regulations, but others have refused to do so, with 
the result that citizens engaged in the manufacture of articles 
of interstate commerce in those states that have adopted such 
regulations are put upon an unfair competition with manu¬ 
facturers in the states that have refused to enact such laws. 
In effect, the states that enact remedial legislation penalize 
themselves. 

When such conditions arise, and they have been of con- 
;3tant recurrence in the great commercial and industrial 
development of the present generation, the people have had 
to seek the relief of national legislation. Every such exten¬ 
sion of the federal power necessarily expands the federal 
machinery of government, and gives occasion for the cry that 
its functions and cost are becoming burdensome and vexatious. 
But if that is true, it is so only because local government in 
the United States has failed in its responsibilities. If the in¬ 
creasing power of the federal government is an evil, if cen¬ 
tralization of government in Washington is a danger, then 
the people of the states have inyited them by allowing their 
local governments to fall into their present condition. 

The state legislatures in America have abdicated their 
functions. With some notable exceptions they no longer en¬ 
joy public confidence or prestige. Their members are ill paid, 
unrepresentative of the best in ability or character in their 
states and by reason of the influences through which they are 
chosen are unresponsive to the public’s needs. Legislative 
sessions in the -states are too likely to be the battles of the 
private interests that control votes through lobbies and the 
political brokers whom we call bosses. Public measures re¬ 
ceive little consideration. In most state legislatures, for ex¬ 
ample, the militia is shamefully neglected. Education is neg¬ 
lected. Unequal tax laws are passed by reason of the politi- 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


157 


cal advantage enjoyed by the representatives of special in¬ 
terests. The principle of representation carried to excess and 
capitalized by political forces produces types of legislators 
easily controlled by interests that specialize in that business. 
These interests, unconcerned for the public welfare, labor only 
for their own ends, and it is those who labor with state legis¬ 
latures that get what they want from them. 

These are the causes, we will find, that have brought 
about the centralization of government in Washington and its 
decripitude in the states. The loss of vigorous and efficient 
local government to the people must be deplored, but if the 
trend is in that direction, if government is becoming more and 
more centralized in Washington, then the safeguard must be 
to watch the government at Washington and hold it strictly 
responsible. 

The fear of centralization that haunted Jefferson was 
based on its threat to local government. Local government he 
thought of as the protector of the people’s liberties. But in 
the evolution of our system it is the federal power that has be¬ 
come the people’s protector while their local government, 
by its breakdown and inefficiency, has become the danger to 
their liberties. Whatever else a government may be it must 
be responsible. If the federal power has assumed respon¬ 
sibility where the states have declined it, the people know at 
least what power to hold to account. 


158 


What of America? 


I would invoke those who fill the seats of justice^ 
and all who minister at its altar, that they execute the 
wholesome and necessary severity of the law. —Daniel 
Webster. 


XL VI. 


The Only Material of Which a Nation Ever Can Be Made. 

HE outstanding fact in the history of the evolu¬ 
tion of our government is that its own necessities 
and those of the American people have tended 
steadily to make us a nation. Nationality, through 
whatever storms and stresses, and whether we 
liked it or not, has been the inevitable goal to¬ 
ward which government and people have moved. 

The “league of firm friendship” of the Confederation 
gave way under those necessities to the “compact”—as many 
believed it to be—of the Constitution. The compact theory, 
after long test, was found to be a defective one. Under it the 
Union was a house divided against itself. After seventy-two 
years of compromises it broke down, and a terrible civil war 
settled it for all time that the Constitution was not a compact 
but the supreme national law of an indestructible union of in¬ 
destructible states. 

This nationality is the heritage which these present gen¬ 
erations have received, from those, who, through those long 
years of compromise, misunderstanding and final conflict, 
fought the battles of nationality and triumphed over pro¬ 
vincialism and disunion. We now are a nation, territorially, 
politically and even physically, for we have seen that the 
continent now is held together by those bonds of communica¬ 
tion that are stronger to bind than distance is to separate. But 
nationality is not a thing wholly territorial, political or physi¬ 
cal in its nature. Nationality is a mental and a spiritual condi¬ 
tion as well. Nationality cannot exist where the people, even 
though living together under the same political system, are not 
one people in thought and aspiration. We have seen the at¬ 
tempt in Europe, in recent years, to make nations simply by 
drawing boundary lines around aggregations of inhabitants. 
Those attempts have not been successful, because, no matter 
what treaties may say, nations are made out of only one mate¬ 
rial, and that is human beings united in mind, with common 
















Shall This Government Live or Die? 


159 















5^.w.; 




mmMm 






:/iV! 










AMERICAN NATIONALITY MUST ALWAYS BE ON GUARD AGAINST DESTRUCTIVE 
FORCES THAT HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO FORM CENTERS OF FOREIGN IN¬ 
FLUENCE IN OUR POPULATION. 

























































160 


What of Ameeica! 


interests, common history, a uniform political training and 
with a spiritual bond stronger than that of the strongest legal 
sanction. 

The reason why it has been impossible to make nations • 
in Europe by the means its diplomats have employed is be¬ 
cause the mixed populations of the continent do not furnish 
these essential elements of nationality. If these orocesses 
have failed there they will fail here. America can oe a na¬ 
tion only so long as the human material out of which it is 
made remains one people. Our present danger is that it will 
not so remain. Our material necessities have caused us in re¬ 
cent decades to admit into our system vast ^ accretions of 
human material not readily malleable under nationalistic proc¬ 
esses. Nor have we done our best to make those processes 
effective upon them. We have allowed alien peoples to come 
here, to settle in colonies in our cities, to retain their own lan¬ 
guage, their racial customs and political animosities and to 
become, in effect, breeding centers of un-American doctrines. 

These people do not know the meaning of liberty. No 
people can know it who know only its deliverances and not 
its obligations. To them liberty is freedom from restraints of 
law and the control of social forces that are the basis of civil¬ 
ization itself. It is to these elements in our population that 
we trace the propagation of doctrines directed openly and 
l)oldly to the overthrow and destruction of the American gov¬ 
ernment. The paid agitators and agents of foreign anarchy, 
Avorking upon the inflammable material we have allowed to 
accumulate in our population, have started the same fires that 
now are ravaging great areas of Europe. If America is to 
escape the fate of Europe these fires must be put out. They 
can be put out only by Americans. It is their house that is 
threatened. It is their nation, their laws and their dearly 
bought institutions of free government that are- marked for 
destruction by these enemies of all government. Only the 
spirit and devotion of those earlier Americans who flew to 
arms when the village bells of Middlesex rang out their mid¬ 
night warning that the British were coming can save America 
today from the invading forces of these new enemies of free¬ 
dom. 

Let us as Americans remember the definition of nationality 
our history has taught us. A nation is one people. We can 
be a nation on these terms, and upon no other. Let it be 
remembered that they were Americans who differed over the 
theory of the Constitution, and whose differences all but cost 
us our nationality. Americans almost became two peoples. If 
Americans could so nearly become two, how much greater is 
the danger to their nationality when division is threatened by 
great sections of our population who are not Americans? 
America shelters them, America gives them her freedom, her 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


161 


opportunities, her prosperity, but no man is an American in 
the true meaning of nationality, whether native or alien born, 
whether rich or poor, powerful or humble, whose mind and 
heart have not received the baptism of her spirit. 

No man is an American who does not obey the laws of his 
country, who does not faithfully discharge his every obligation 
of citizenship, who does not hold his representatives in gov¬ 
ernment'strictly to account, who does not jealously guard his 
civic rights from those forces, whether alien or domestic, that 
seek to despoil him of them or who by his indifference to or 
contempt for public affairs when put in the balance against 
his own, abandons his privilege of suffrage to the enemies of 
his country, its laws and its institutions. 


162 


What of America? 


We must extend the authority of the Union to the 
persons of the citizens—the only proper objects of gov¬ 
ernment. —Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist, No. XV. 

XLVII. 


The Results of the Failure of Americans to Take Part in Government. 

LEXANDER HAMILTON, speaking in the consti¬ 
tutional convention, declared that the first great 
and essential principle necessary for the support 
of government was an active and constant inter¬ 
est in supporting it. He also named as neces¬ 
sary principles, an habitual attachment of the 
people to their government, a necessary employ¬ 
ment of force whether of laws or arms, and a willingness of 
men of ability and influence to participate in the honors and 
emoluments of government. 

No American ever uttered wiser or weightier words. The 
government the Constitution set up was not the government 
Hamilton wanted, but the principles he laid down are even 
more essential to its support than they would have been to 
the more central and exclusive authority he contended for. 
The framers by making the government popular, that is, a 
government of the whole people rather than of the few, pre¬ 
supposed that the people would take an interest in it, that 
they would support the enforcement of its laws and participate 
in its operation. If they had supposed otherwise they would 
not have made the people the original source of the govern¬ 
ment’s power and therefore the masters of its fate. 

Every particular in which government in the United States 
has failed may be traced to the failure of the people to support 
it in respect of these principles. The American people do not 
take an active and constant interest in government. Their 
attachment to it is proclaimed rather than demonstrated. They 
do not support its laws, although nothing is clearer than Ham¬ 
ilton’s grave truth that the only alternative to the force of 
law is the force of arms. The men of ability and influence 
in their communities, whom Hamilton looked to for the suc¬ 
cessful operation of government, do not participate in it, but 
abandon its posts of honor and power to demagogues, cheap 
politicians and professional office holders. Congress, the state 
legislatures and the government of our cities are filled with 
men who, in no particular, resemble those Americans Hamil- 















Shall This Government Live or Die? 163 

ton and the other framers relied upon to vindicate their work. 
The people who elect these men to represent them furnish as 
little justification for the confidence the founders reposed 
when they laid broad the foundations of suffrage. The Ameri- 



THE SUCCESS OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT DEPENDS ON THE PARTICI¬ 
PATION IN IT OF THOSE FITTED BY INTEREST AND INTELLIGENCE TO CON¬ 
DUCT IT. WHEN THEY DECLINE THEIR FUNCTION DEMOCRACY FAILS. 


can people have not, in short, made good the claim of fit¬ 
ness for self government which the Constitution makers as¬ 
serted for them. 

The whole theory of representative government is based 
on the interest, the intelligence and the patriotism of the 
voter. Let the voter fail in these qualities, let him refuse to 
vote or vote ignorantly, corruptly or indifferently, and the 
































































































164 


What of America! 


whole scheme of representative government, as it differs from 
those forms in which the people have no voice, falls to the 
ground. Representative government can be just as bad as the 
worst form of government that ever existed, once it is deprived, 
by whatever means, of the intelligent participation of the most 
fit and the most responsible part of the people whose author¬ 
ity it rests upon. Government is thus deprived when the 
office of voting is declined by those best fitted to vote and is 
exercised only by those the least fitted, or who vote from in¬ 
terested motives not public in character. 

American cities and American states are governed today 
on the mandate of voters whom the Philadelphia founders 
would not have dreamed of investing with the suffrage. They 
are governed by a minority of the ignorant, the vicious and the 
corrupt. They are governed by voters who are not Americans 
in spirit, in political education, in mental or moral fitness. 
These are the voters who have taken up, for the purposes of 
commercial politics, the responsibilities fitted Americans have 
laid down. It is by such votes the mayors of our cities, 
the governors of our states, our senators and representatives in 
congress are invested with those powers which the founders 
delegated with such caution and with such jealous care against 
their abuse. 

“Men love power,” said Hamilton. He thought this am¬ 
bition would bring to the support of government men fitted to 
wield power. He did not anticipate that the fit would refuse 
this responsibility and leave it to men whose love of power is 
the love of the personal gain they can get from its exercise. 
■Rut it is to such men Americans have turned over their gov- 
ment. The attachment to it that Hamilton hoped for is 
now the attachment, not of the people, but of a professional 
class of politicians who make a profit of it. These are the 
men who control, through political organization, that suffrage 
the people’s right to which was so vigorously fought for in the 
convention. When Roger Sherman of Connecticut and El- 
bridge Gerry of Massachusetts doubted the wisdom of per¬ 
mitting the people to elect national representatives, James 
Madison, that great champion of democracy, stood sponsor for 
the American people, and declared popular elections were es¬ 
sential to free government. “This great fabric to be raised,” 
he said, “will be more stable and durable if it shall rest on 
the solid foundation of the people themselves.” 

There the Constitution rested it, and the great Americans 
who had successfully defended the representative principle left 
the scene believing the results of their labors were secure. Was 
that confidence well founded? Let Americans look around at 
the results that have followed their abandonment of their po¬ 
litical privileges and responsibilities, and answer. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


165 


In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public 
opinion now rules the world. —John Stuart Mill. 


XLVIII. 


How the Betrayal of Government Has Come From 


the People Themselves. 


F WE examine the debates in the Constitutional 
convention and the papers constituting “The 
Federalist,” in which its work was defended, we 
will be struck by the fact that the prevailing 
fear of the framers was the fear of usurpation 
in the government, or the subversion of its laws, 
by some member or branch of the government 
itself. There was fear of execution usurpation, of legislative 
usurpation and of judicial usurpation. And finally there was 
fear of military usurpation. It was these fears that led to the 
elaborate system of checks and counter checks on authority 
that are a distinguishing mark of the Constitution, and that 
impelled Hamilton and Madison to devote, in “The Federal¬ 
ist,” so many of their arguments to showing the security of 
these guarantees. 

But it seems never to have struck the majority of the 
convention that any fear for the stability of the government 
was to be apprehended from the American people. On the 
contrary, it was to the people the convention looked for that 
vigilance which it was thought would be the super-check 
when any of the others proved inadequate. Thus Hamilton, 
in No. XXVI of “The Federalist,” observes that the state 
legislatures, which he assumed the people would maintain in 
a vigorous efficiency as the bulwark of their local government, 
“will always be not only vigilant, but suspicious and jealous 
guardians of the citizens against encroachments from the 
general government.” These legislatures, he added, always 
would be ready “to sound the alarm to the people” on any ap¬ 
pearance of danger to their liberties. 

But what would these makers and expounders of the Con¬ 
stitution think today if they could witness the manner in which 
the American people have acquitted themselves of their po¬ 
litical stewardship? The original fears for the government 
liave proved groundless. No executive has subverted it. The 
legislative and judicial branches have not betrayed their trust. 
Militarism never has raised its head. It is from the American 
people themselves that has proceeded the great and growing 
danger to their government and their liberties. Through their 
indifference to their great privileges and neglect of their dear¬ 
ly bought rights has proceeded an almost complete decay of 














166 


What of America? 


those bulwarks to local government which Hamilton regarded 
as essential to the federal plan. No state legislature now 
sounds the alarm when our liberties are threatened. Instead 
of being jealous guardians of the citizens, those assemblies 



THE MAKERS OF THE CONSTITUTION BESTOWED THE SUFFRAGE AS A PRIVI¬ 
LEGE TO BE USED AND GUARDED BY A RESPONSIBLE CITIZENSHIP. THE 
WRECKERS OF IT NOW TOSS THE BALLOT OUT AS A POLITICAL LARGESS 
TO THE UNFIT AND UNTRIED. 

now are vigilant only for the welfare of those private and 
political interests that exert the only influence now felt in 
their halls. 

And who is responsible for this decay of the state gov¬ 
ernments? Who, but the citizens themselves who now suf- 



















































Shall This Government Live or Die? 167 

fer through it? “The solid foundation of the people them¬ 
selves/’ upon which Madison declared the. Constitution and the 
governnient must rest, has proved a weak one. With every 
broadening of the foundation of suffrage, which ought to be the 
progressive process in every growing and strengthening 
democracy, it has proved weaker and weaker. What is the 
moral and mental complexion of a legislature or city council, 
but an accurate reflection of like qualities in the suffrage? 
]f legislatures fail in their public obligations it is because 
voters fail in theirs. In a representative government every ill 
or failure in the public administration is bound to trace back 
to the people. This is the test of democracy; here lies either 
its strength or its weakness. If the people are alert, intelli¬ 
gent, active in the exercise of their right of suffrage, the 
administration of their government will show the strength of 
democracy; if they are indifferent, neglectful, corrupt, 
democracy will exhibit only its weakness. That form of gov¬ 
ernment never can be anything but a faithful likeness of the 
people who live under it. 

A just and impartial verdict upon the mental and moral 
attributes of the American people, derived from a contem¬ 
plation of their public assemblies, would be incompatible with 
the view that they are, as a whole, fit for self government. 
According to any just theory of democracy, its government 
should improve in proportion as it is brought nearer to the 
people from whom it emanates. According to practice, the 
nearer government is brought to the American people the 
worse it gets. Their national government, which is the farthest 
removed from them and with which they have the least to do, 
is better than their state government which is under their 
more immediate control; and their state government is better 
than their city government, which is directly under their hand 
and which is the worst government ever devised or tolerated by 
a civilized people. 

As the -great American experiment of resting govern¬ 
ment upon the people mow stands, therefore, the only reason¬ 
able conclusion must be that either the people must develop 
the political responsibility necessary to the operation of 
democracy, or the experiment must fail. 

When the question of admitting new states to the union 
came up in the Constitutional convention, apprehension was 
found to exist lest this extension of the electoral power might 
threaten the stability of the government, for which the politi¬ 
cal experience of the older states was felt to be a guarantee. 
When we see how suffrage now is tossed to the untried and 
unfit, as a political largess from a careless and reckless people, 
what a painful comparison is ’suggested between the careful 
makers of our government of those days and the unthinking 
wreckers of it of these! 


168 


What of Ameeica? 


This government cannot endure permanently half 
slave and half free .—Abraham Lincoln. 

XLIX. 


A Class Interest That Madison Did Not Foresee. 

AMES MADISON warned in “The Federalist’’ that 
the first necessity laid on a government was to 
repress the tendency of classes of the population 
to put their own concerns above those of the 
public. No government, he said, could tolerate 
a domestic power that was, or threatened to be¬ 
come greater than its own. Madison cited 
landed interests, manufacturing interests, mercantile interests, 
moneyed interests as being among those likely to assert rights 
above the common rights and to challenge the power of gov¬ 
ernment exercised in the interests of all the people. 

These were the classes that were found the most insistent 
for privilege when the Constitution was being made, and they 
or their successors have since been found as intent as Madi¬ 
son found them on using government for their own purposes. 
Class interest is still to be found at the door of congress, the 
state legislatures and city councils asking for legislation not 
public in character; self seeking, favor seeking—the embodi¬ 
ment of privilege. 

But there are today special interests that Madison could 
not have foreseen that have grown to great power in our 
country, and that assert for themselves privileges that the class 
interests of his day never dreamed of asserting. 

What, for example, would Madison have said of the pre¬ 
tensions of an individual, not a public official, not a delegated 
authority of any community—just a private citizen, and one 
of no savory reputation to boot—who should require his pleas¬ 
ure to be taken on all public measures before they should be 
permitted to go before the representatives of the people? 
What would he have said of the spectacle of such an indi¬ 
vidual designating the candidates to be voted for in elections, 
dictating the appointments of public officials after they are 
elected, deciding for reasons of his own what public moneys 
should be appropriated and for what purposes, specifying what 
public contracts should be awarded and who should receive 
them, fixing the conditions under which franchises, virtually 
involving a taxing power to be exercised upon the people. 
















Shall This Government Live or Die? 


169 


should be granted to public utilities companies, controlling the 
political machinery through which the voters in their party 
organizations declared their principles and preferences—doing 
all this, not in a public, but in a private capacity and for his 
private profit? 



WAQ T-T VOT? THiq THAT AMERICANS RATHER THAN BE TAXED BY A KING WITH- 
CONSENT THREW ^fTtHE RULE OF THE BRITISH CROWN AND 
“BUILDED A STATE WITHOUT A KING?” 


This individual, or a combination of such, is known to¬ 
day in every great American city and in most states. His 
person and his sijstem have come to constitute a class interest 


























































170 


What of America? 


in America that is as great a menace to its existence as a 
nation as the great class interest of slavery ever was. The 
challenge of political bossism to equality, to freedom, to na¬ 
tionality, is as bold and arrogant as was slavery’s. Its march 
across the soil of America is as steady and resistless. Its in¬ 
vasion of political and human rights is as ruthless and as de¬ 
structive of the soul of America and the spirit of liberty. 

Let us witness what political wrong endured for a little 
space will do to the soul of a nation. In the Constitutional 
convention of 1787 George Mason of the slave state of Vir¬ 
ginia made an abolitionist speech, and was applauded in his 
own state for doing it. The soul of America had not then 
been seared by this fearful thing. But mark how swift and 
how terrible was its work. Less than seventy years later, in 
the free territory of Kansas, the law made it a felony, punish¬ 
able by fine and imprisonment for a white man to tell a 
colored man the simple truth that Kansas was free soil. In 
seventy years the great national wrong of slavery had killed 
the soul of America and stifled in the land of its birth the voice 
of liberty. 

Let us make no mistake. If the monstrous political wrong 
of political bossism, as it exists and daily grows in our free 
system, marches on unchecked, it will, as swiftly as slavery ever 
threatened to, tread out the last spark of political liberty in this 
America. 

Such is the constitution of man that he cannot endure wrong 
and long retain the impulse to repel it. Can a people who have, 
with scarcely a protest, permitted their political powers and 
privileges to be taken from their hands by a domestic power 
unknown to the Constitution and the institutions of their country, 
be believed capable of defending their liberties against a foreign 
power? By accepting this usurpation and tamely enduring it, 
have they not become slaves to wrong, fit only to do its bidding 
and to serve as bondsmen in the noble temple where once they 
were masters? 

Young America, to defend a principle, took up arms against 
the greatest military power in the world, '‘a power that has 
dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions 
and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, 
and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one 
continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.” 

America in the strength of its manhood, forgetful of that 
principle and unmindful of that great past, has supinely bent 
the knee to a domestic power that would dissolve under one 
glance of its eye, if that eye flashed its old proud fire. 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


171 


If any man attempts to haul down the American 
flag, shoot him on the spot, —Secretary of the Treasury 
John A. Dix to the federal agent at New Orleans, Janu¬ 
ary, 1861. 


L. 


What of America? Can Only Be Answered By Americans. 

UR survey of the origin, nature and operation of 
our government must conclude. We have seen the 
slow and precarious growth of the principle under 
which the authority of government came to be 
lodged in the hands of the people. We have seen 
how our ancestors, more aware than we of the 
dangers of a governing power not under their con¬ 
trol, fought to retain that principle in full vigor and operation. 
We have seen how, as the recession of those early scenes in our 
history has dimmed their outline to our eyes, we have forgotten 
their lessons and allowed new tyrannies to interfere with the 
working of that principle. 

“Experience,^’ said Madison, “is the oracle of truth, and 
where its responses are unequivocal they ought to be conclusive 
and sacred.” 

Experience conveys to Americans of today a lesson that 
only folly and madness can reject. That lesson is that under 
the democratic principle the security of government and the 
preservation of liberty are bound up with the ability and willing¬ 
ness of the people to operate that principle themselves. If they 
neglect or refuse to direct its operation forces fatal to democracy 
will direct its operation against the people; for it is just as 
susceptible of that control as any principle ever devised by op¬ 
pression for its own use. 

These undemocratic forces are active and aggressive in 
America today. They gain their ends, not by violence and 
revolution or the destruction of popular forms, for they are 
sensible that such means would rouse the people to their danger, 
but by gaining possession, through the indifference of the people, 
of the political and judicial machinery of government and operat¬ 
ing it in their own interests. The domestic enemies of America’s 
free government do not, for example, attack the representative 
principle; but far more subtly destroy its popular processes by 
using it to elect their own representatives to office. They do 
not attempt to abolish trial by jury. Instead, they seek to con- 














172 


What of America? 


trol the jury system in their own interests. They do not seek 
to set aside the guarantees of equality in the Constitution, but by 
legislation and interpretation to make inequalities, favorable to 
their own interests, appear to be public measures. 

If the American people allow their government thus to be 
taken out of their hands by these class interests, then the great 
American experiment in democracy is ended. 

The democratic form has no guarantee of permanence save 
in the interest and political activity of the people who live under 
it. If they allow class interest to rise and assume the sovereign 
power of war, as it did in Illinois, that ends the sovereignty of 
the nation. If they allow it to usurp the judicial power, as it 
did in that same state, that ends trial by jury. 

“The great interest of man on earth,” said Daniel Webster, 
“is justice.” 

If there is a power in America today that can deny justice 
to man, that power is the master of this country, of its govern¬ 
ment and of its people. If there is a power than can, for its 
own ends and against the interests of all the people, deny the 
necessaries of life to others by limiting or controlling their 
production and distribution; if there is a power that can deny 
the right of man to work; if there is a power than can deny 
him the right to vote and have his vote counted; that can control 
his representatives, unmake or destroy the force of his laws or 
deprive him, in any way, of the benefit of their just and equal 
operation, then that power, and not the power at Washington, 
is the government of America. 

If American nationality triumphed over the pretensions of 
the sovereignty of states, shall it surrender to those of class? 

If Americans to gain the right to tax themselves defied the 
power of kings, shall they relinquish it to bosses? 

No thoughtful American can contemplate the political and 
class lawlessness that has been given rein in this country today, 
and escape the conclusion that its citizenship has ceased to 
value its liberties. It has abandoned the honorable profession of 
politics to a venal rabble that has made its name odious. It has 
surrendered its cities and its states to enemies more destructive 
of its privileges than ever marched in the uniform or under the 
flag of a foreign despot. It has, by default, granted to the worst 
forms of privilege immunities which Americans of another gen¬ 
eration defied the arms of a military empire to take. It has 
surrendered the principle of representation by abandoning it to 
the commercial brokers of politics; of equality, by permitting 
class interests to make their own laws; of justice, by allowing 
courts to become the citadels of moneyed or political might; of 
liberty, by giving license to combinations of citizens to harass, 
oppress and murder other citizens. 

What of America? Shall this government live or die? 


Shall This Government Live or Die? 


173 


In 1861, President Lincoln said that of three main points in 
regard to their government the American people had demonstrat¬ 
ed but two. One was their ability to establish it and the other 
their ability to administer it. The third, then to be determined, 
was whether they could maintain it against a formidable internal 
attempt to overthrow it. In 1864 he repeated, that the great 
test of popular institutions was whether a government not too 
strong for the liberties of its people could be strong enough to 
stand when threatened by its people. 

That third question, though the result of the Civil War 
seemed to settle it in favor of nationalism, still waits the answer 
of America’s citizenship. The threat to America today is from 
its own people. The great republic whose arms have extorted a 
wholesome fear, and even a sullen respect, from the powers of 
Europe, cannot today compel the obedience or depend on the 
discipline of its own citizens. 

The safety and greatness of a nation are in the unity and 
strength of its people. On its people, and on them alone, must 
rest its defense in the hour of trial. When the hour shall come 
in which storms shall gather, when the tempest shall beat upon 
governments, when the sun of freedom shall be darkened and 
the voice of liberty be put to silence and the nations of the 
earth shall drink of the cup of trembling—in that hour. What 
of America? 

The End. 
















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